The Real Charlotte

by Edith Somerville

  There was no one to be seen but on the table were two half-empty cups of tea, and the new sponge-cake, reduced by one-third, graced the centre of the board. Miss Mullen glared round the room. A stifled giggle broke from the corner behind the piano, and Francie’s head appeared over the top, instantly followed by that of Mr. Hawkins.

  “We thought ‘twas visitors when we heard the wheels,” said Miss Fitzpatrick, still laughing, but looking very much ashamed of herself, “and we went to hide when they passed the window for fear we’d be seen.” She paused, not knowing what to say, and looked entreatingly at Pamela. “I never thought it’d be you—”

  It was borne in on her suddenly that this was not the manner in which Miss Dysart would have acted under similar circumstances, and for the first time a doubt as to the fitness of her social methods crossed her mind.

  Pamela, as she drove home after tea, thought she understood why it was that Miss Mullen did not wish her cousin to be left to her own devices in Lismoyle.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  There was no sound in the red gloom, except the steady trickle of running water, and the anxious breathing of the photographer. Christopher’s long hands moved mysteriously in the crimson light, among phials, baths, and cases of negatives, while uncanny smells of various acids and compounds thickened the atmosphere. Piles of old trunks towered dimly in the corners, a superannuated sofa stood on its head by the wall, with its broken hindlegs in the air, three old ball skirts hung like ghosts of Bluebeard’s wives upon the door, from which, to Christopher’s developing tap, a narrow passage forced its angular way.

  There was presently a step on the uncarpeted flight of attic stairs, accompanied by a pattering of broad paws, and Pamela, closely attended by the inevitable Max, slid with due caution into the room.

  “Well, Christopher,” she began, sitting gingerly down in the darkness on an old imperial, a relic of the period when Sir Benjamin posted to Dublin in his own carriage, “mamma says she is to come!”

  “Lawks!” said Christopher succinctly, after a pause occupied by the emptying of one photographic bath into another.

  “Mamma said she ‘felt Charlotte Mullen’s position so keenly in having to leave that girl by herself,’” pursued Pamela, “‘that it was only common charity to take her in here while she was away.’”

  “Well, my dear, and what are you going to do with her?” said Christopher cheerfully.

  “Oh, I can’t think,” replied Pamela despairingly; “and I know that Evelyn does not care about her; only last night she said she dressed like a doll at a bazaar.”

  Christopher busied himself with his chemicals, and said nothing.

  “The fact is, Christopher,” went on his sister decisively, “you will have to undertake her. Of course, I’ll help you, but I really cannot face the idea of entertaining both her and Evelyn at the same time. Just imagine how they would hate it.”

  “Let them hate it,” said Christopher, with the crossness of a good-natured person who feels that his good nature is going to make him do a disagreeable thing.

  “Ah, Christopher, be good; it will only be for three days, and she’s very easy to talk to; in fact,” ended Pamela apologetically, “I think I rather like her!”

  “Well, do you know,” said Christopher, “the curious thing is, that though I can’t talk to her and she can’t talk to me, I rather like her, too— when I’m at the other end of the room.”

  “That’s all very fine,” returned Pamela dejectedly; “it may amuse you to study her through a telescope, but it won’t do anyone else much good; after all, you are the person who is really responsible for her being here. You saved her life.”

  “I know I did,” replied her brother irritably, staring at the stumpy candle behind the red glass of the lantern, unaware of the portentous effect of its light upon his eye-glass, which shone like a ball of fire; “that’s much the worst feature of the case. It creates a dreadful bond of union. At that infernal bazaar, whenever I happened to come within hail of her, Miss Mullen collected a crowd and made a speech at us. I will say for her that she hid with Hawkins as much as she could, and did her best to keep out of my way. As I said before, I have no personal objection to her, but I have no gift for competing with young women. Why not have Hawkins to dinner every night and to luncheon every day? It’s much the simplest way of amusing her, and it will save me a great deal of wear and tear that I don’t feel equal to.”

  Pamela got up from the imperial.

  “I hate you when you begin your nonsense of theorising about yourself as if you were a mixture of Methuselah and Diogenes; I have seen you making yourself just as agreeable to young women as Mr. Hawkins or anyone;” she paused at the door. “She’ll be here the day after to-morrow,” with a sudden collapse into pathos. “Oh, Christopher, you must help me to amuse her!”

  Two days afterwards Miss Mullen left for Dublin by the early train, and in the course of the morning her cousin got upon an outside car in company with her trunk, and embarked upon the preliminary stage of her visit to Bruff. She was dressed in the attire which in her own mind she specified as her “Sunday clothes,” and as the car rattled through Lismoyle, she put on a pair of new yellow silk gloves with a confidence in their adequacy to the situation that was almost touching. She felt a great need of their support. Never since she was grown up had she gone on a visit, except for a night or two to the Hemphill’s summer lodgings at Kingstown, when such “things” as she required were conveyed under her arm in a brown paper parcel, and she and the three Miss Hemphills had sociably slept in the back drawing-room. She had been once at Bruff, a visit of ceremony, when Lady Dysart only had been at home, and she had sat and drunk her tea in unwonted silence, wishing that there were sugar in it, but afraid to ask for it, and respecting Charlotte for the ease with which she accepted her surroundings, and discoursed of high and difficult matters with her hostess. It was only the thought of writing to her Dublin friends to tell them of how she had stayed at Sir Benjamin Dysart’s place that really upheld her during the drive; no matter how terrible her experiences might be, the fact would remain to her, sacred and unalterable.

  Nevertheless, its consolations seemed very remote at the moment when the car pulled up at the broad steps of Bruff, and Gorman the butler came down them, and solemnly assisted her to alight, while the setter and spaniel, who had greeted her arrival with the usual official chorus of barking, smelt round her politely but with extreme firmness. She stood forlornly in the big cool hall, waiting till Gorman should be pleased to conduct her to the drawing-room, uncertain as to whether she ought to take off her coat, uncertain what to do with her umbrella, uncertain of all things except of her own ignorance. A white stone double staircase rose overawingly at the end of the hall; the floor under her feet was dark and slippery, and when she did at length prepare to follow the butler, she felt that visiting at grand houses was not as pleasant as it sounded.

  A door into the hall suddenly opened, and there issued from it the hobbling figure of an old man wearing a rusty tall hat down over his ears, and followed by a cadaverous attendant, who was holding an umbrella over the head of his master, like a Siamese courtier.

  “D—n your eyes, James Canavan!” said Sir Benjamin Dysart, “can’t you keep the rain off my new hat, you blackguard!” Then spying Francie, who was crossing the hall, “Ho-ho! That’s a fine girl, begad! What’s she doing in my hall?”

  “Oh, hush, hush, Sir Benjamin!” said James Canavan, in tones of shocked propriety. “That is a young lady visitor.”

  “Then she’s my visitor,” retorted Sir Benjamin, striking his ponderous stick on the ground, “and a devilish pretty visitor, too! I’ll drive her out in my carriage to-morrow.”

  “You will, Sir Benjamin, you will,” answered his henchman, hurrying the master of the house along towards the hall door; while Francie, with a new and wholly unexpected terror added to those she had brought with her, followed the butler to the drawing-room.

&nbs
p; It was a large room. Francie felt it to be the largest she had ever been in, as she advanced round a screen, and saw Lady Dysart at an immeasurable distance working at a heap of dingy serge, and behind her, still further off, the well-curled head of Miss Hope-Drummond just topping the cushion of a low arm-chair.

  “Oh, how do you do!” said Lady Dysart, getting up briskly, and dropping as she did so a large pair of scissors and the child’s frock at which she had been working. “You are very good to have come over so early.”

  The geniality of Lady Dysart’s manner might have assured anyone less alarmed than her visitor that there was no ill intention in this remark; but such discernment was beyond Francie.

  “Miss Mullen told me to be over here by twelve, Lady Dysart,” she said abjectly, “and as she had the car ordered for me I didn’t like—”

  Lady Dysart began to laugh, with the large and yet refined bonhommie that was with her the substitute for tact.

  “Why shouldn’t you come early, my dear child?” she said, looking approvingly at Francie’s embarrassed countenance. “I’ll tell Pamela you are here. Evelyn, don’t you know Miss Fitzpatrick?”

  Miss Hope-Drummond, thus adjured, raised herself languidly from her chair, and shook hands with the newcomer, as Lady Dysart strode from the room with her customary business-like rapidity. Silence reigned for nearly a minute after the door closed; but at length Miss Hope-Drummond braced herself to the exertion of being agreeable.

  “Very hot day, isn’t it?” looking at Francie’s flushed cheeks.

  “It is indeed, roasting! I was nearly melting with the heat on the jaunting-car coming over,” replied Francie, with a desire to be as responsive as possible, “but it’s lovely and cool in here.”

  She looked at Miss Hope-Drummond’s spotless white gown, and wished she had not put on her Sunday terra-cotta.

  “Oh, is it?”

  Silence; during which Francie heard the wheels of her car grinding away down the avenue, and wished that she were on it.

  “Have you been out on the lake much lately, Miss Hope-Drummond?”

  Francie’s wish was merely the laudable one of trying to keep the heavy ball of conversation rolling, but the question awoke a slumbering worm of discontent in her companion’s well-ordered breast. Christopher was even now loosing from his moorings at the end of the park, without having so much as mentioned that he was going out; and Captain Cursiter, her own compatriot, attached—almost linked— to her by the bonds of mutual acquaintances, and her thorough knowledge of the Lincolnshire Cursiters, had not risen to the fly that she had only yesterday thrown over him on the subject of the steam-launch.

  “No; I had rather more than I cared for the last time we were out, the day of the picnic. I’ve had neuralgia in my face ever since that evening, we were all kept out so late.”

  “Oh, my! That neuralgia’s a horrid thing,” said Francie sympathetically. “I didn’t get any harm out of it with all the wetting and the knock on my head and everything. I thought it was lovely fun! But”—forgetting her shyness in the interest of the moment—”Mr. Hawkins told me that Cursiter said to him the world wouldn’t get him to take out ladies in his boat again!”

  Miss Hope-Drummond raised her dark eyebrows.

  “Really? That is very crushing of Captain Cursiter.”

  Francie felt in a moment an emphasis on the word Captain; but tried to ignore her own confusion.

  “It doesn’t crush me, I can tell you! I wouldn’t give a pin to go in his old boat. I’d twice sooner go in a yacht, upsets and all!”

  “Oh!”

  Miss Hope-Drummond said no more than this, but her tone was sufficient. Her eyes strayed towards the book that lay in her lap, and the finger inserted in its pages showed, as if unconsciously, a tendency to open it again.

  There was another silence, during which Francie studied the dark and unintelligible oil-paintings on the expanses of wall, the flowers, arranged with such easy and careless lavishness in strange and innumerable jars and vases; and lastly, Dinah, in a distant window, catching and eating flies with disgusting avidity. She felt as if her petticoats showed her boots more than was desirable, that her gloves were of too brilliant a tint, and that she ought to have left her umbrella in the hall. At this painful stage of her reflections she heard Lady Dysart’s incautious voice outside.

  “It’s always the way with Christopher; he digs a hole and buries himself in it whenever he’s wanted. Take her out and let her eat strawberries now; and then in the afternoon—” the voice suddenly sank as if in response to an admonition, and Francie’s already faint heart sank along with it. Oh, to be at the Hemphills, making toffee on the parlour fire, remote from the glories and sufferings of aristocratic houses! The next moment she was shaking hands with Pamela, and becoming gradually aware that she was in an atmosphere of ease and friendliness, much as the slow pleasure of a perfume makes itself slowly felt. The fact that Pamela had on a grass hat of sunburnt maturity, and a skirt which bore the imprint of dogs’ paws was in itself reassuring, and as they went together down a shrubbery walk, and finally settled upon the strawberry beds in the wide, fragrant kitchen-garden, the first terrors began to subside in Francie’s trembling soul, and she found herself breathing more naturally in this strange, rarefied condition of things. Even luncheon was less formidable than she had expected. Christopher was not there, the dreaded Sir Benjamin was not there, and Lady Dysart consulted her about the cutting-out of poor clothes, and accepted with an almost alarming enthusiasm the suggestions that Francie diffidently brought up from the depths of past experience of the Fitzpatrick wardrobe.

  The long, unusual leisure of the afternoon passed by her like a pleasant dream, in which, as she sat in a basket-chair under the verandah outside the drawing-room windows, illustrated papers, American magazines, the snoring lethargy of the dogs, and the warm life and stillness of the air were about equally blended. Miss Hope-Drummond lay aloof in a hammock under a horse-chestnut tree at the end of the flower-garden, working at the strip of Russian embroidery that some day was to languish neglected on the stall of an English bazaar; Francie had seen her trail forth with her arms full of cushions, and dimly divined that her fellow-guest was hardly tolerating the hours that were to her like fragments collected from all the holidays she had ever known. No wonder, she thought, that Pamela wore a brow of such serenity, when days like this were her ordinary portion. Five o’clock came, and with it, with the majestic punctuality of a heavenly body, came Gorman and the tea equipage, attended by his satellite, William, bearing the tea-table. Francie had never heard the word idyllic, but the feeling that it generally conveys came to her as she lay back in her chair, and saw the roses swaying about the pillars of the verandah, and watched the clots of cream sliding into her cup over the broad lip of the cream jug, and thought how incredibly brilliant the silver was, and that Miss Dysart’s hands looked awfully pretty while she was pouring out tea, and weren’t a bit spoiled by being rather brown. It was consolatory that Miss Hope-Drummond had elected to have her tea conveyed to her in the hammock; it was too much trouble to get out of it, she called, in her shrill, languid voice, and no one had argued the matter with her. Lady Dysart, who had occupied herself during the afternoon in visiting the garden-beds and giving a species of clinical lecture on each to the wholly unimpressed gardener, had subsided into a chair beside Francie, and began to discuss with her the evangelical preachers of Dublin, a mark of confidence and esteem which Pamela noticed with astonishment. Francie had got to her second cup of tea, and had evinced an edifying familiarity with Lady Dysart’s most chosen divines, when the dogs, who had been seated opposite Pamela, following with lambent eyes the passage of each morsel to her lips, rushed from the verandah, and charged with furious barkings across the garden and down the lawn towards two figures, whom in their hearts they knew to be the sons of the house, but whom, for histrionic purposes, they affected to regard as dangerous strangers.

  Miss Hope-Drummond sat up in her hammock and pinn
ed her hat on straight.

  “Mr. Dysart,” she called, as Christopher and Garry neared her chestnut tree, “you’ve just come in time to get me another cup of tea.”

  Christopher dived under the chestnut branches, and presently, with what Miss Hope-Drummond felt to be unexampled stupidity, returned with it, but without his own. He had even the gaucherie to commend her choice of the hammock, and having done so, to turn and walk back to the verandah, and Miss Hope-Drummond asked herself for the hundredth time how the Castlemores could have put up with him.

  “I met the soldiers out on the lake to-day,” Christopher remarked as he sat down; “I told them to come and dine to-morrow.” He looked at Pamela with an eye that challenged her gratitude, but before she could reply, Garry interposed in tones muffled by cake.

  “He did, the beast; and he might have remembered it was my birthday, and the charades and everything.”

  “Oh, Garry, must we have charades?” said Pamela lamentably.

  “Well, of course we must, you fool,” returned Garry with scriptural directness; “I’ve told all the men about the place, and Kitty Gascogne’s coming to act, and James Canavan’s going to put papa to bed early and help us—” Garry’s voice sank to the fluent complaining undertone that distinguishes a small boy with a grievance, and Christopher turned to his mother’s guest.

  “I suppose you’ve acted in charades, Miss Fitzpatrick?”

  “Is it me act? Oh goodness, no, Mr. Dysart! I never did such a thing but once, when I had to read Lady Macbeth’s part at school, and I thought I’d die laughing the whole time.”

  Pamela and Lady Dysart exchanged glances as they laughed at this reminiscence. Would Christopher ever talk to a girl with a voice like this? was the interpretation of Pamela’s glance, while Lady Dysart’s was a mere note of admiration for the way that the sunlight caught the curls on Francie’s forehead as she sat up to speak to Christopher, and for the colour that had risen in her cheeks since his arrival, more especially since his announcement that Captain Cursiter and Mr. Hawkins were coming to dinner. There are few women who can avoid some slight change of manner and even of appearance, when a man is added to the company, and it may at once be said that Francie was far from trying to repress her increased interest on such an occasion.