It was strange that in these comparisons it was to Christopher that she turned for a standard. For her there was no flaw in Hawkins; her angry heart could name no fault in him except that he had wounded it; but she illogically felt Christopher’s superiority without being aware of deficiency in the other. She did not understand Christopher; she had hardly understood him at that moment to which she now looked back with a gratified vanity that was tempered by uncertainty and not unmingled with awe; but she knew him just well enough, and had just enough perception to respect him. Fanny Hemphill and Delia Whitty would have regarded him with a terror that would have kept them dumb in his presence, but for which they would have compensated themselves at other times by explosive gigglings at his lack of all that they admired most in young men. Some errant streak of finer sense made her feel his difference from the men she knew, without wanting to laugh at it; as has already been said, she respected him, an emotion not hitherto awakened by a varied experience of “gentlemen friends.”
There were times when the domestic affairs of Albatross Villa touched their highest possibility of discomfort, when Bridget had gone to the christening of a friend’s child at Enniskerry, and returned next day only partially recovered from the potations that had celebrated the event; or when Dottie, unfailing purveyor of diseases to the family, had imported German measles from her school. At these times Francie, as she made fires, or beds, or hot drinks, would think of Bruff and its servants with a regret that was none the less burning for its ignobleness. Several times when she lay awake at night, staring at the blank of her own future, while the stabs of misery were sharp and unescapable, she had thought that she would write to Christopher, and tell him what had happened, and where she was. In those hours when nothing is impossible and nothing is unnatural, his face and his words, when she saw him last, took on their fullest meaning, and she felt as if she had only to put her hand out to open that which she had closed. The diplomatic letter, about nothing in particular, that should make Christopher understand that she would like to see him again, was often half composed, had indeed often lulled her sore heart and hot eyes to sleep with visions of the divers luxuries and glories that this single stepping-stone should lead to. But in the morning, when the children had gone to school, and she had come in from marketing, it was not such an easy thing to sit down and write a letter about nothing in particular to Mr. Dysart. Her defeat at the hands of Hawkins had taken away her belief in herself. She could not even hint to Christopher the true version of her fight with Charlotte, sure though she was that an untrue one had already found its way to Bruff; she could not tell him that Bridget had got drunk, and that butter was so dear they had to do without it; such emergencies did not somehow come within the scope of her promise to trust him, and, besides, there was the serious possibility of his volunteering to see her. She would have given a good deal to see him, but not at Albatross Villa. She pictured him to herself, seated in the midst of the Fitzpatrick family, with Ida making eyes at him from under her fringe, and Bridget scuffling audibly with Bobby outside the door. Tally Ho was a palace compared with this, and yet she remembered what she had felt when she came back to Tally Ho from Bruff. When she thought of it all, she wondered whether she could bring herself to write to Charlotte, and try to make friends with her again. It would be dreadful to do, but her life at Albatross Villa was dreadful, and the dream of another visit to Lismoyle, when she could revenge herself on Hawkins by showing him his unimportance to her, was almost too strong for her pride. How much of it was due to her thirst to see him again at any price, and how much to a pitiful hankering after the flesh pots of Egypt, it is hard to say; but November and December dragged by, and she did not write to Christopher or Charlotte, and Lambert remained her only correspondent at Lismoyle.
It was a damp, dark December, with rain and wind nearly every day. Bray Head was rarely without a cap of grey cloud, and a restless pack of waves mouthing and leaping at its foot. The Esplanade was a mile-long vista of soaked grass and glistening asphalte, whereon the foot of man apparently never trod; once or twice a storm had charged in from the south-east, and had hurled sheets of spray and big stones on to it, and pounded holes in the concrete of its sea-wall. There had been such a storm the week before Christmas. The breakers had rushed upon the long beach with “a broad-flung, shipwrecking roar,” and the windows of the houses along the Esplanade were dimmed with salt and sand. The rain had come in under the hall door at Albatross Villa, the cowl was blown off the kitchen chimney, causing the smoke to make its exit through the house by various routes, and, worst of all, Dottie and the boys had not been out of the house for two days. Christmas morning was signalised by the heaviest downpour of the week. It was hopeless to think of going to church, least of all for a person whose most presentable boots were relics of the past summer, and bore the cuts of lake rocks on their dulled patent leather. The post came late, after its wont, but it did not bring the letter that Francie had not been able to help expecting. There had been a few Christmas cards, and one letter which did indeed bear the Lismoyle post-mark, but was only a bill from the Misses Greely, forwarded by Charlotte, for the hat that she had bought to replace the one that was lost on the day of the capsize of the Daphine.
The Christmas mid-day feast of tough roast-beef and pallid plum-pudding was eaten, and then, unexpectedly, the day brightened, a thin sunlight began to fall on the wet roads and the dirty, tossing sea, and Francie and her younger cousins went forth to take the air on the Esplanade. They were the only human beings upon it when they first got there; in any other weather Francie might have expected to meet a friend or two from Dublin there, as had occurred on previous Sundays, when the still enamoured Tommy Whitty had ridden down on his bicycle, or Fanny Hemphill and her two medical student brothers had asked her to join them in a walk round Bray Head. The society of the Hemphills and Mr. Whitty had lost, for her, much of its pristine charm, but it was better than nothing at all; in fact, those who saw the glances that Miss Fitzpatrick, from mere force of habit, levelled at Mr. Whitty, or were witnesses of a pebble-throwing encounter with the Messrs. Hemphill, would not have guessed that she desired anything better than these amusements.
“Such a Christmas Day!” she thought to herself, “without a soul to see or to talk to! I declare, I think I’ll turn nurse in an hospital, the way Susie Brennan did. They say those nurses have grand fun, and ‘twould be better than this awful old place anyhow!” She had walked almost to the squat Martello tower, and while she looked discontentedly up at Bray Head, the last ray of sun struck on its dark shoulder as if to challenge her with the magnificence of its outline and the untruthfulness of her indictment. “Oh, you may shine away!” she exclaimed, turning her back upon both sunlight and mountain and beginning to walk back to where Bobby and Dottie were searching for jelly-fish among the sea-weed cast up by the storm, “the day’s done for now, it’s as good for me to go up to the four o’clock service as be streeling about in the cold here.”
Almost at the same moment the chimes from the church on the hill behind the town struck out upon the wind with beautiful severity, and obeying them listlessly, she left the children and turned up the steep suburban road that was her shortest way to Christ Church.
It was a long and stiffish pull; the wind blew her hair about till it looked like a mist of golden threads, the colour glowed dazzlingly in her cheeks, and the few men whom she passed bestowed upon her a stare of whose purport she was we well aware. This was a class of compliment which she neither resented not was surprised at, and it is quite possible that some months before she might have allowed her sense of it to be expressed in her face. But she felt now as if the approval of the man in the street was not worth what it used to be. It was, of course, agreeable in its way, but on this Christmas afternoon, with all its inevitable reminders of the past and the furture, it brought with it the thought of how soon her face had been forgotten by the men who had praised it most.
The gas was lighted in the church, and the service
was just beginning as she passed the decorated font and went uncertainly up a side-aisle till she was beckoned into a pew by a benevolent old lady. She knelt down in a corner, beside a pillar that was wreathed with a thick serpent of evergreens, and the old lady looked up from her admission of sin to wonder that such a pretty girl was allowed to walk through the street by herself. The heat of the chruch had brought out the aromatic smell of all the green things, the yellow gas flared from its glittering standards, and the glimmering colours of the east window were dying into darkness with the dying daylight. When she stood up for the Psalms she looked round the chruch to see if there were anyone there whom she knew; there were several familiar faces but no one with whom she had ever exchanged a word, and turning round again she devoted herself to the hopless task of finding out the special psalms that the choir were singing. Having failed in this, she felt her religious duties to be for the time suspended, and her thoughts strayed afield over things in general, sittling down finally on a subject that had become more pressing than was pleasant.
It is a truism of ancient standing that money brings no cure for heartache, but it is also true that if the money were not there the heartache would be harder to bear. Probably if Francie had returned from Lismoyle to a smart house in Merrion Square, with a carriage to drive in, and a rich relative ready to pay for new winter dresses, she would have been less miserable over Mr. Hawkins’ desertion than she was at Albatross Villa; she certainly would not have felt as unhappy as she did now, standing up with the shrill singing clamouring in her ears, while she tried in different ways to answer the question of how she was to pay for the dresses that she had bought to take to Lismoyle. Twenty-five pounds a year does not go far when more than half of it is expended upon board and lodging, and a whole quarter has been anticipated to pay for a summer visit, and Lambert’s prophecy that she would find herself in the county court some day, seemed not unlikely to come true. In her pocket was a letter from a Dublin shop, containing more than a hint of legal proceedings; and even if she were able to pay them a temporising two pounds in a month, there still would remain five pounds due, and she would not have a farthing left to go on with. Everything was at its darkest for her. Her hardy, supple nature was dispirited beyond it power of reaction, and now and then the remembrance of the Sundays of last summer caught her, till the pain came in her throat, and the gaslight spread into shaking stars.
The service went on, and Francie rose and knelt mechanically with the rest of the congregation. She was not irreligious, and even the name of scepticism was scarcely understood by her, but she did not consider that religion was applicable to love affairs and bills; her mind was too young and shapeless for anything but a healthy, negligent belief in what she had been taught, and it did not enter into her head to utilise religion as a last resource, when everything else had turned out a failure. She regarded it with respect, and believed that most people grew good when they grew old, and the service passed over her head with a vaguely pleasing effect of music and light. As she came out into the dark lofty porch a man stepped forward to meet her. Francie started violently.
“Oh, goodness gracious!” she cried, “you frightened my life out!”
But for all that, she was glad to see Mr. Lambert.
* * *
CHAPTER XXXVII.
That evening when Mrs. Fitzpatrick was putting on her best cap her long cameo ear-rings she said to her husband:
“Well now, Robert, you mark words, he’s after her.”
“Tchah!” replied Mr. Fitzpatrick, who was not in a humour to admit that any woman could be attractive, owing to the postponement of his tea by his wife so that cakes might be baked in Mr. Lambert’s honour; “you can’t see a man without thinking he’s in love with someone or other.”
“I suppose you think it’s to see yourself he’s come all the way from Lismoyle,” rejoined Mrs. Fitzpatrick with becoming spirit, “and says he’s going to stop at Breslin’s Hotel for a week.”
“Oh, very well, have it your own way,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick acrimoniously, “I suppose you have it all settled, and he’ll be married to her by special license before the week’s out.”
“Well, I don’t care, Robert, You wouldn’t think to look at him that he’d only buried his wife four months and a half ago—though I will say he’s in deep mourning —but for all that no one’d blame him that he didn’t think much of that poor creature, and ‘twould be a fine match for Francie if she’d take him.”
“Would she take him!” echoed Mr. Fitzpatrick scornfully; “would a duck swim? I never saw the woman yet that wouldn’t half hang herself to get married!”
“Ah! have done being so cross, Robert, Christmas day and all; I wonder you married at all since you think so little of women.”
Finding this argument not easy to answer, Mr. Fitzpatrick said nothing, and his wife, too much interested to linger over side issues, continued,
“This girls say they heard him asking her to drive to the Dargle with him to-morrow, and he’s brought a grand box of sweets for the childern as a Christmas box, and six lovely pair of gloves for Francie! ‘Pon me word, Icall her a very lucky girl!”
“Well, if I was a woman it isn’t that fellow I’d fancy,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick, unexpectedly changing his ground, “but as, thank God, I’m not, it’s no affair of mine.” Having delivered himself of this sentiment, Mr. Fitzpatrick went downstairs. The smell of hot cakes rose deliciously upon the air, and, as his niece emerged from the kitchen with a plateful of them in her hand, and called to him to hurry before they got cold, he thought to himself that Lambert would have the best of the bargain if he married her.
Francie found the evening surprisingly pleasant. She was, as she had always been, entirely at her ease with Mr. Lambert, and did not endure, on his account any vicarious suffering because the table-cloth was far from clean, and the fact that Bridget put on the coal with her fingers was recorded on the edges of the plates. If he chose to come and eat hot cakes in the bosom of the Fitzpatrick family instead of dining at his hotel, he was just as well able to do without a butter-knife as she was, and, at all events, he need not have stayed unless he killed, she thought, with a little] flash of amusement and pride that her power over him, at least, was not lost. There had been times during the last month or two when she had believed that he, like everyone else, had forgotten her, and it was agreeable to find that she had been mistaken.
The next day proved to be one of the softest and sunniest of the winter, and, as they flew along the wet road towards the Dargle, on lthe smartest of the Bray outside cars, a great revival took place in Francie’s spirits. They left their car at the gate of the glen to which the Dargle river has given its name, and strolled together along the private road that runs from end to end of it. A few holiday-makers had been tempted down from Dublin by the fine day, but there was nothing that even suggested the noisy pleasure parties that vulgarise the winding beauty of the ravine on summer bank holidays.
“Doesn’t it look fearfful lonely to-day?” said Francie, who had made her last visit there as a member of one of these same pleasure parties, and had enjoyed herself hightly. “You can’t hear a thing but the running of the water.”
They were sitting on the low parapet of the road, looking sown the brown slope of the tree-tops to the river, that was running a foaming frace among the rocks at the bottom of the cleft.
“I don’t call it lonely,” said Lambert, casting a discontented side-long glance at a couple walking past arm-in-arm, evidently in the silently blissful stage of courtship; “how many more would you like?”
“Oh, lots,” replied Francie, “but I’m not going to tell you who they are!”
“I know one, anyhow,” said Lambert, deliberately leading up to a topic that up to this had been only slightly touched on.
When he had walked home from the church with Francie the evening before, he had somehow not been able to talk to her consecutively; he had felt a nervous awkwardness that he had not believed himself
capable of, and the fact that he was holding an umbrella over her head and that she had taken his arm had seemed the only thing that he could give his mind to.
“Who do you know?”
Francie had plucked a ribbon of hart’s-tongue from the edge of the wall, and was drawing its cold satiny length across her lips.
“Wouldn’t you like it now if you saw—” he paused and looked at francie—”who shall we say—Charlotte Mullen coming up the road?”
“I wouldn’t care.”
“Wouldn’t you though! You’d run for your life, the way you did before out of Lismoyle,” said Lamnbert, looking hard at her and laughing not quite genuinely.
The strip of hart’s-tongue could not conceal a rising flow in the face behind it, but Francie’s voice was as undaunted as ever as she replied,
“Who told you I ran for my life?”
“You told me so yourslef.”
The Real Charlotte Page 32
