The Real Charlotte

by Edith Somerville

  “Ha—a—ah! I see ye, missy! Stop picking my flowers! Push, James Canavan, you devil, you! Push!”

  A bath-chair, occupied by an old man in a tall hat, and pushed by a man also in a tall hat, had suddenly turned the corner of the house, and Miss Hope-Drummond drew back precipitately to avoid the uplifted walking-stick of Sir Benjamin Dysart.

  “Oh, fie, for shame, Sir Benjamin!” exclaimed the man who had been addressed as James Canavan.

  “Pray, cull the rose, miss,” he continued, with a flourish of his hand; “sweets to the sweet!”

  Sir Benjamin aimed a backward stroke with his oak stick at his attendant, a stroke in which long practice had failed to make him perfect, and in the exchange of further amenities the party passed out of sight. This was not Miss Hope-Drummond’s first meeting with her host. His bath-chair had daily, as it seemed to her, lain in wait in the shrubberies, to cause terror to the solitary, and discomfiture to tête-à-têtes; and on one morning he had stealthily protruded the crook of his stick from the door of his room as she went by, and all but hooked her round the ankle with it.

  “Really, it is disgraceful that he is not locked up,” she said to herself crossly, as she gathered the contested bud, and sat down to write letters; “but in Ireland no one seems to think anything of anything!”

  It was very hot down in the garden where Lady Dysart and Pamela were at work; Lady Dysart kneeling in the inadequate shade of a parasol, whose handle she had propped among the pans in the wheelbarrow, and Pamela weeding a flower-bed a few yards away. It was altogether a scene worthy in its domestic simplicity of the Fairchild Family only that instead of Mr. Fairchild, “stretched on the grass at a little distance with his book,” a bronze-coloured dachshund lay roasting his long side in the sun; and also that Lady Dysart, having mistaken the young chickweed in a seedling pan for the asters that should have been there, was filling her bed symmetrically with the former, an imbecility that Mrs. Sherwood would never have permitted in a parent. The mother and daughter lifted their heads at the sound of the conflict on the terrace.

  “Papa will frighten Evelyn into a fit,” observed Pamela, rubbing a midge off her nose with an earthy gardening glove; “I wish James Canavan could be induced to keep him away from the house.”

  “It’s all right, dear,” said Lady Dysart, panting a little as she straightened her back and surveyed her rows of chickweed; “Christopher is with her, and you know he never notices anyone else when Christopher is there.”

  Lady Dysart had in her youth married, with a little judicious coercion, a man thirty years older than herself, and after a long and, on the whole, extremely unpleasant period of matrimony, she was now enjoying a species of Indian summer, dating from six years back, when Christopher’s coming of age and the tenants’ rejoicings thereat, had caused such a paroxysm of apoplectic jealousy on the part of Christopher’s father as, combining with the heat of the day, had brought on “a stroke.” Since then the bath-chair and James Canavan had mercifully intervened between him and the rest of the world, and his offspring were now able to fly before him with a frankness and success impossible in the old days.

  Pamela did not answer her mother at once.

  “Do you know I’m afraid Christopher isn’t with her,” she said, looking both guilty and perturbed.

  Lady Dysart groaned aloud.

  “Why, where is he?” she demanded “I left Evelyn helping him to paste in photographs after breakfast; I thought that would have been nice occupation for them for at least two hours; but as for Christopher—” she continued, her voice deepening to declamation, “it is quite hopeless to expect anything from him. I should rather trust Garry to entertain anyone. The day he took her out in the boat they weren’t in till six o’clock!”

  “That was because Garry ran the punt on the shallow, and they had to wade ashore and walk all the way round.”

  “That has nothing to say to it; at all events they had something to talk about when they came back, which is more than Christopher has when he has been out sailing. It is most disheartening; I ask nice girls to the house, but I might just as well ask nice boys—Oh, of course, yes—” in answer to a protest from her daughter; “he talks to them; but you know quite well what I mean.”

  This complaint was not the first indication of Lady Dysart’s sentiments about this curious son whom she had produced. She was a clever woman, a renowned solver of the acrostics in her society paper, and a holder of strong opinions as to the prophetic meaning of the Pyramids; but Christopher was an acrostic in a strange language, an enigma beyond her sphere. She had a vague but rooted feeling that young men were normally in love with somebody, or at least pretending to be so; it was, of course, an excellent thing that Christopher did not lose his heart to the wrong people, but she would probably have preferred the agitation of watching his progress through the most alarming flirtations to the security that deprived conversation with other mothers of much of its legitimate charm.

  “Well, there was Miss Fetherstone,” began Pamela after a moment of obvious consideration.

  “Miss Fetherstone!” echoed Lady Dysart in her richest contralto, fixing eyes of solemn reproach upon her daughter; “do you suppose that for one instant I thought there was anything in that? No baby, no idiot baby, could have believed in it!”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Pamela; “I think you and Mrs. Waller believed in it, at least I remember your both settling what your wedding presents were to be!”

  “I never said a word about wedding presents, it was Mrs. Waller! Of course she was anxious about her own niece, just as anybody would have been under the circumstances.” Lady Dysart here became aware of something in Pamela’s expression that made her add hurriedly, “Not that I ever had the faintest shadow of belief in it. Too well do I know Christopher’s platonic philanderings; and you see the affair turned out just as I said it would.

  Pamela refrained from pursuing her advantage.

  “If you like I’ll make him come with Evelyn and me to the choir practice this afternoon,” she said after a pause. “Of course he’ll hate it, poor boy, especially as Miss Mullen wrote to me the other day and asked us to come to tea after it was over.”

  “Oh, yes!” said Lady Dysart with sudden interest and forgetfulness of her recent contention, “and you will see the new importation whom we met with Mr. Lambert the other day. What a charming young creature she looked! ‘The fair one with the golden locks’ was the only description for her! And yet that miserable Christopher will only say that she is ‘chocolate-boxey!’ Oh! I have no patience with Christopher’s affectation!” she ended, rising from her knees and brushing the earth from her extensive lap with a gesture of annoyance. She began to realise that the sun was hot and luncheon late, and it was at this unpropitious moment that Pamela, having finished the flower-bed she had been weeding, approached the scene of her mother’s labours.

  “Mamma,” she said faintly, “you have planted the whole bed with chickweed!”

  * * *

  CHAPTER IX.

  It had been hard work pulling the punt across from Bruff to Lismoyle with two well-grown young women sitting in the stern; it had been a hot walk up from the landing-place to the church, but worse than these, transcendentally worse, in that it involved the suffering of the mind as well as the body, was the choir practice. Christopher’s long nose drooped despondingly over his Irish church hymnal, and his long back had a disconsolate hoop in it as he leaned it against the wall in his place in the backmost row of the choir benches. The chants had been long and wearisome, and the hymns were proving themselves equally enduring. Christopher was not eminently musical or conspicuously religious, and he regarded with a kind of dismal respect and surprise the fervour in Pamela’s pure profile as she turned to Mrs. Gascogne and suggested that the hymn they had just gone through twice should be sung over again. He supposed it was because she had High Church tendencies that she was able to stand this sort of thing, and his mind drifted into abstract speculations as to
how people could be as good as Pamela was and live.

  In the interval before the last hymn he derived a temporary solace from finding his own name inscribed in dull red characters in the leaf of his hymn-book, with, underneath in the same colour, the fateful inscription, “Written in blood by Garrett Dysart.” The thought of his younger brother utilising pleasantly a cut finger and the long minutes of the archdeacon’s sermon, had for the moment inspired Christopher with a sympathetic amusement, but he had relapsed into his pristine gloom. He knew the hymn perfectly well by this time, and his inoffensive tenor joined mechanically with the other voices, while his eyes roamed idly over the two rows of people in front of him. There was nothing suggestive of ethereal devotion about Pamela’s neighbours. Miss Mullen’s heaving shoulders and extended jaw spoke of nothing but her determination to out-scream everyone else; Miss Hope-Drummond and the curate, on the bench in front of him, were singing primly out of the same hymn-book, the curate obviously frightened, Miss Hope-Drummond as obviously disgusted. The Misses Beattie were furtively eyeing Miss Hope-Drummond’s costume; Miss Kathleen Baker was openly eyeing the curate, whose hymn-book she had been wont to share at happier choir practices, and Miss Fitzpatrick, seated at the end of the row, was watching from the gallery window with unaffected interest the progress of the usual weekly hostilities between Pamela’s dachshund and the sexton’s cat, and was not even pretending to occupy herself with the business in hand. Christopher’s eyes rested on her appraisingly, with the minute observation of short sight, fortified by an eyeglass, and was aware of a small head with a fluffy halo of conventionally golden hair, a straight and slender neck, and an apple-blossom curve of cheek; he found himself wishing that she would turn a little further round.

  The hymn had seven verses, and Pamela and Mrs. Gascogne were going inexorably through them all; the schoolmaster and schoolmistress, an estimable couple, sole prop of the choir on wet Sundays, were braying brazenly beside him, and this was only the second hymn. Christopher’s D sharp melted into a yawn, and before he could screen it with his hymn-book, Miss Fitzpatrick looked round and caught him in the act. A suppressed giggle and a quick lift of the eyebrows instantly conveyed to him that his sentiments were comprehended and sympathised with, and he as instantly was conscious that Miss Mullen was following the direction of her niece’s eye. Lady Dysart’s children did not share her taste for Miss Mullen; Christopher vaguely felt some offensive flavour in the sharp smiling glance in which she included him and Francie, and an unexplainable sequence of thought made him suddenly decide that her niece was as second rate as might have been expected.

  Never had the choir dragged so hopelessly; never had Mrs. Gascogne and Pamela compelled their victims to deal with so many and difficult tunes, and never at any previous choir practice had Christopher registered so serious a vow that under no pretext whatever should Pamela entice him there again. They were all sitting down now, while the leaders consulted together about the Kyrie, and the gallery cushions slowly turned to stone in their well-remembered manner. Christopher’s ideas of church-going were inseparably bound up with those old gallery cushions. He had sat upon them ever since, as a small boy, he had chirped a treble beside his governess, and he knew every knob in their anatomy. There is something blighting to the devotional tendencies in the atmosphere of a gallery. He had often formulated this theory for his own exculpation, lying flat on his back in a punt in some shady backwater, with the Oxford church bells reminding him reproachfully of Lismoyle Sundays, and of Pamela, the faithful, conscientious Pamela, whipping up the pony to get to church before the bell stopped. Now, after a couple of months’ renewed acquaintance with the choir, the theory had hardened into a tedious truism, and when at last Christopher’s long legs were free to carry him down the steep stairs, the malign influence of the gallery had brought their owner to the verge of free thought.

  He did not know how it had happened or by whose disposition of the forces it had been brought about, but when Miss Mullen’s tea-party detached itself from the other members of the choir at the churchyard gate, Pamela and Miss Hope-Drummond were walking on either side of their hostess, and he was behind with Miss Fitzpatrick.

  “You don’t appear very fond of hymns, Mr. Dysart,” began Francie at once, in the pert Dublin accent that, rightly or wrongly, gives the idea of familiarity.

  “People aren’t supposed to look about them in church,” replied Christopher with the peculiar suavity which, combined with his disconcerting infirmity of pausing before he spoke, had often baffled the young ladies of Barbadoes, and had acquired for him the reputation, perhaps not wholly undeserved, of being a prig.

  “Oh, I daresay!” said Francie; “I suppose that’s why you sit in the back seat, that no one’ll see you doing it!”

  There was a directness about this that Lismoyle would not have ventured on, and Christopher looked down at his companion with an increase of interest.

  “No; I sit there because I can go to sleep.”

  “Well, and do you? and who do you get to wake you?”—her quick voice treading sharply on the heels of his quiet one—”I used always to have to sit beside Uncle Robert in church to pinch him at the end of the sermon.”

  “I find it very hard to wake at the end of the sermon too,” remarked Christopher, with an experimental curiosity to see what Miss Mullen’s unexpected cousin would say next.

  “Do y’ indeed?” said Francie, flashing a look at him of instant comprehension and complete sang froid. “I’ll lend the schoolmistress a hat-pin if you like! What on earth makes men so sleepy in church I don’t know,” she continued; “at our church in Dublin I used to be looking at them. All the gentlemen sit in the corner seat next the aisle, because they’re the most comfortable, y’ know, and from the minute the clergyman gives out the text—” she made a little gesture with her hand, showing thereby that half the buttons were off her glove— “they’re snoring!”

  How young she was, and how pretty, and how inexpressibly vulgar. Christopher thought all these things in turn, while he did what in him lay to continue the conversation in the manner expected of him. The effort was perhaps not very successful, as, after a few minutes, it was evident that Francie was losing her first freedom of discourse, and was casting about for topics more appropriate to what she had heard of Mr. Dysart’s mental and literary standard.

  “I hear you’re a great photographer, Mr. Dysart,” she began. “Miss Mullen says you promised to take a picture of her and her cats, and she was telling me to remind you of it. Isn’t it awfully clever of you to be able to do it?”

  To this form of question reply is difficult, especially when it is put with all the good faith of complete ignorance. Christopher evaded the imbecilities of direct response.

  “I shall think myself awfully clever if I photograph the cats,” he said.

  “Clever!” she caught him up with a little shriek of laughter. “I can tell you you’ll want to be clever! Are you able to photograph up the chimney or under Norry’s bed? for that’s where they always run when a man comes into the house, and if you try to stop them they’d claw the face off you! Oh, they’re terrors!”

  “It’s very good of you to tell me all this in time,” Christopher said, with a rather absent laugh. He was listening to Miss Mullen’s voice, and realising, for the first time, what it would be to live under the same roof with her and her cats; and yet this girl seemed quite light-hearted and happy. “Perhaps, on the whole, I’d better stay away?” he said, looking at her, and feeling in the sudden causeless way in which often the soundest conclusions are arrived at, how vast was the chasm between her ideal of life and his own, and linking with the feeling a pity that would have been self-sufficient if it had not also been perfectly simple.

  “Ah! don’t say you won’t come and take the cats!” Francie exclaimed.

  They reached the Tally Ho gate as she spoke, and the others were only a step or two in front of them. Charlotte looked over her shoulder with a benign smile.

&
nbsp; “What’s this I hear about taking my cats?” she said jovially. “You’re welcome to everything in my house, Mr. Dysart, but I’ll set the police on you if you take my poor cats!”

  “Oh, but I assure you—”

  “He’s only going to photo them,” said Christopher and Francie together.

  “Do you hear them, Miss Dysart?” continued Charlotte, fumbling for her latch key, “conspiring together to rob a poor lone woman of her only live stock!”

  She opened the door, and as her visitors entered the hall they caught a glance of Susan’s large, stern countenance regarding them with concentrated suspicion through the rails of the staircase.

  “My beauty-boy!” shouted his mistress, as he vanished upstairs. “Steal him if you can, Mr. Dysart.”

  Miss Hope-Drummond looked rather more uninterested than is usual in polite society. When she had left the hammock, slung in the shade beside the tennis-ground at Bruff, it had not been to share Mr. Corkran’s hymn-book; still less had it been to walk from the church to Tally Ho between Pamela and a woman whom, from having regarded as merely outrée and incomprehensible, she had now come to look upon as rather impertinent. Irish society was intolerably mixed, she decided, as she sniffed the various odours of the Tally Ho hall, and, with some sub-connection of ideas, made up her mind that photography was a detestable and silly pursuit for men. While these thoughts were passing beneath her accurately curled fringe, Miss Mullen opened the drawing-room door, and, as they walked in, a short young man in light grey clothes arose from the most comfortable chair to greet them.