The Real Charlotte

by Edith Somerville

  Lady Dysart headed her party as they left the steamer, and her imposing figure in her fur-lined cloak so filled the gangway that Pamela could not, at first, see who it was that met her mother as she stepped on to the platform. The next moment she found herself shaking hands with Mr. Lambert, and then, to her unbounded astonishment, with Miss Fitzpatrick. The lamps were throwing strong light and shadow upon Francie’s face, and Pamela’s first thought was how much thinner she had become.

  “Mr. Lambert and I missed our train back to Bray,” Francie began at once in a hurried deprecating voice, “and we came down to see the boat come in just to pass the time—” Her voice stopped as if she had suddenly gasped for breath, and Pamela heard Hawkins’ voice say behind her:

  “How de do, Miss Fitzpatrick? Who’d have thought of meetin’ you here?” in a tone of cheerfully casual acquaintanceship.

  Even Pamela, with all her imaginative sympathy, did not guess what Francie felt in that sick and flinching moment, when everything rung and tingled round her as if she had been struck; the red had deserted her cheek like a cowardly defender, and the ground felt uneven under her feet, but the instinct of self-control that is born of habit and convention in the feeblest of us came mechanically to her help.

  “And I never thought I’d see you either,” she answered, in the same tone; “I suppose you’re all going to Lismoyle together, Miss Dysart?”

  “No, we stay in Dublin to-night,” said Pamela, with sufficient consciousness of the situation to wish to shorten it. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Hawkins, I should be very glad if you would put these rugs in the carriage.”

  Hawkins disappeared with the rugs in the wake of Lady Dysart, and Lambert and Pamela and Francie followed slowly together in the same direction. Pamela was in the difficult position of a person who is full of a sympathy that it is wholly out of the question to express.

  “I am so glad that we chanced to meet you here,” she said, “we have not heard anything of you for such a long time.”

  The kindness in her voice had the effect of conveying to Francie how much in need of kindness she was, and the creeping smart of tears gathered under her eyelids.

  “It’s awfully kind of you to say so, Miss Dysart,” she said, with something in her voice that made even the Dublin brogue pathetic; “I didn’t think anyone at Lismoyle remembered me now.”

  “Oh, we don’t forget people quite so quickly as that,” said Pamela, thinking that Mr. Hawkins must have behaved worse than she had believed; “I see this is our carriage. Mamma, did you know that Miss Fitzpatrick was here?”

  Lady Dysart was already sitting in the carriage, her face fully expressing the perturbation that she felt, as she counted the parcels that Mr. Hawkins was bestowing in the netting.

  “Oh yes,” she said, with a visible effort to be polite, “I saw her just now; do get in, my dear, the thing may start at any moment.”

  If her mind had room for anything beside the anxieties of travelling, it was disapprobation of Francie and of the fact that she was going about alone with Mr. Lambert, and the result was an absence of geniality that added to Francie’s longing to get away as soon as possible. Lambert was now talking to Pamela, blocking up the doorway of the carriage as he stood on the step, and over his shoulder she could see Hawkins, still with his back to her, and still apparently very busy with the disposal of the dressing-bags and rugs. He was not going to speak to her again, she thought, as she stood a little back from the open door with the frosty air nipping her through her thin jacket; she was no more to him than a stranger, she, who knew every turn of his head, and the feeling of his yellow hair that the carriage lamp was shining upon. The very look of the first-class carriage seemed to her, who had seldom, if ever, been in one, to emphasise the distance that there was between them. The romance that always clung to him even in her angriest thoughts, was slaughtered by this glimpse of him, like some helpless atom of animal life by the passing heel of a schoolboy. There was no scaffold, with its final stupendous moment, and incentive to heroism; there was nothing but an ignoble end in commonplace neglect.

  The ticket-collector slammed the door of the next carriage, and Francie stepped back still further to make way for Lambert as he got off the step. She had turned her back on the train, and was looking vacantly at the dark outlines of the steamer when she became aware that Hawkins was beside her.

  “Er—good-bye—” he said awkwardly, “the train’s just off.”

  “Good-bye,” replied Francie, in a voice that sounded strangely to her, it was so everyday and conventional.

  “Look here,” he said, looking very uncomfortable, and speaking quickly, “I know you’re angry with me. I couldn’t help it. I tried to get out of it, but it—it couldn’t be done. I’m awfully sorry about it—”

  If Francie had intended to reply to this address, it was placed beyond her power to do so. The engine, which had been hissing furiously for some minutes, now set up the continuous ear-piercing shriek that precedes the departure of the boat train, and the guard, hurrying along the platform, signified to Hawkins in dumb show that he was to take his seat. The whistle continued unrelentingly; Hawkins put out his hand, and Francie laid hers in it. She looked straight at him for a second, and then, as she felt his fingers close hard round her hand in dastardly assurance of friendship if not affection, she pulled it away, and turned to Lambert, laughing and putting her hands up to her ears to show that she could hear nothing in the din. Hawkins jumped into the carriage again, Pamela waved her hand at the window, and Francie was left with Lambert on the platform, looking at the red light on the back of the guard’s van, as the train wound out of sight into the tunnel.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXXIX.

  It was cold, east-windy morning near the middle of March, when the roads were white and dusty, and the clouds were grey, and Miss Mullen, seated in her new dining-room at Gurthnamuckla, was finishing her Saturday balancing of accounts. Now that she had become a landed proprietor, the process was more complicated than it used to be. A dairy, pigs, and poultry cannot be managed and made to pay without thought and trouble, and, as Charlotte had every intention of making Gurthnamuckla pay, she spared neither time nor account books, and was beginning to be well satisfied with the result. She had laid out a good deal of money on the house and farm, but she was going to get a good return for it, or know the reason why; and, as no tub of skim milk was given to the pigs, or barrow of turnips to the cows, without her knowledge, the chances of success seemed on her side.

  She had just entered, on the page headed Receipts, the sale of two pigs at the fair, and surveyed the growing amount, in its neat figures, with complacency; then, laying down her pen, she went to the window, and directed a sharp eye at the two men who were spreading gravel on the reclaimed avenue, and straightening the edges of the grass.

  “‘Pon my word, it’s beginning to look like a gentleman’s avenue,” she said to herself, eyeing approvingly the arch of the elm tree branches, and the clumps of yellow daffodils, the only spots of light in the colourless landscape, while the cawing of the building rooks had a pleasant, manorial sound in her ears. A young horse came galloping across the lawn, with floating mane and tail, and an intention to jump the new wooden railings that only failed him at the last moment, and resulted in two soapy slides in the grass, that Charlotte viewed from her window with wonderful equanimity. “I’ll give Roddy a fine blowing up when he comes over,” she thought, as she watched the colt cutting capers among the daffodils; “I’ll ask him if he’d like me to have his four precious colts in to tea. He’s as bad about them as I am about the cats!” Miss Mullen’s expression denoted that the reproof would not be of the character to which Louisa was accustomed, and Mrs. Bruff, who had followed her mistress into the window, sprang on a chair, and, arching her back, leaned against the well-known black alpaca apron with a feeling that the occasion was exceptionally propitious. The movements of Charlotte’s character, for it cannot be said to possess the power of development, were
akin to those of some amphibious thing; whose strong, darting course under the water is only marked by a bubble or two, and it required almost an animal instinct to note them. Every bubble betrayed the creature below, as well as the limitations of its power of hiding itself, but people never thought of looking out for these indications in Charlotte, or even suspected that she had anything to conceal. There was an almost blatant simplicity about her, a humorous rough and readiness which, joined with her literary culture, proved business capacity, and dreaded temper, seemed to leave no room for any further aspect, least of all of a romantic kind.

  Having opened the window for a minute to scream abusive directions to the men who were spreading gravel, she went back to the table, and, gathering her account-books together, she locked them up in her davenport. The room that, in Julia Duffy’s time, had been devoted to the storage of potatoes, was now beginning life again, dressed in the faded attire of the Tally Ho dining-room. Charlotte’s books lined one of its newly-papered walls; the fox-hunting prints that dated from old Mr. Butler’s reign at Tally Ho hung above the chimney-piece, and the maroon rep curtains were those at which Francie had stared during her last and most terrific encounter with their owner. The air of occupation was completed by a basket on the rug in front of the fire with four squeaking kittens in it, and by the Bible and the grey manual of devotion out of which Charlotte read daily prayers to Louisa the orphan and the cats. It was an ugly room, and nothing could ever make it anything else, but with the aid of the brass-mounted grate, a few bits of Mrs. Mullen’s silver on the sideboard, and the deep-set windows, it had an air of respectability and even dignity that appealed very strongly to Charlotte. She enjoyed every detail of her new possessions, and, unlike Norry and the cats, felt no regret for the urban charms and old associations of Tally Ho. Indeed, since her aunt’s death, she had never liked Tally Ho. There was a strain of superstition in her that, like her love of land, showed how strongly the blood of the Irish peasant ran in her veins; since she had turned Francie out of the house she had not liked to think of the empty room facing her own, in which Mrs. Mullen’s feeble voice had laid upon her the charge that she had not kept; her dealings with table-turning and spirit-writing had expanded for her the boundaries of the possible, and made her the more accessible to terror of the supernatural. Here, at Gurthnamuckla, there was nothing to harbour these suggestions; no brooding evergreens rustling outside her bedroom window, no rooms alive with the little incidents of a past life, no doors whose opening and shutting were like familiar voices reminding her of the footsteps that they had once heralded. This new house was peopled only by the pleasant phantoms of a future that she had fashioned for herself out of the slightest and vulgarest materials, and her wakeful nights were spent in schemings in which the romantic and the practical were logically blended.

  Norry the Boat did not, as has been hinted, share her mistress’s satisfaction in Gurthnamuckla. For four months she had reigned in its kitchen, and it found no more favour in her eyes than on the day when she, with her roasting-jack in one hand and the cockatoo’s cage in the other, had made her official entry into it. It was not so much the new range, or the barren tidyness of the freshly-painted cupboards, these things had doubtless been at first very distressing, but time had stored the cupboards with the miscellanies that Norry loved to hoard, and Bid Sal had imparted a home-like feeling to the range by wrenching the hinge of the oven-door so that it had to be kept closed with the poker. Even the unpleasantly dazzling whitewash was now turning a comfortable yellow brown, and the cobwebs were growing about the hooks in the ceiling. But none of these things thoroughly consoled Norry. Her complaints, it is true, did not seem adequate to account for her general aspect of discontent. Miss Mullen heard daily lamentations over the ravages committed by Mr. Lambert’s young horses on the clothes bleaching on the furze-bushes, the loss of “the clever little shcullery that we had in Tally Ho,” and the fact that “if a pairson was on his dying bed for the want of a grain o’ tay itself, he should thravel three miles before he’d get it,” but the true grievance remained locked in Norry’s bosom. Not to save her life would she have admitted that what was really lacking in Gurthnamuckla was society. The messengers from the shops, the pedlar-women; above all, the beggars; of these she had been deprived at a blow, and life had become a lean ill-nurtured thing without the news with which they had daily provided her. Billy Grainy and Nance the Fool were all that remained to her of this choice company, the former having been retained in his offices of milk-seller, messenger, and post-boy, and the latter, like Abdiel, faithful among the faithless, was undeterred by the distance that had discouraged the others of her craft, and limped once a week to Gurthnamuckla for the sake of old times and a mug of dripping.

  By these inadequate channels a tardy rill of news made its way to Miss Mullen’s country seat, but it came poisoned by the feeling that every one else in Lismoyle had known it for at least a week, and Norry felt herself as much aggrieved as if she had been charged “pence apiece” for stale eggs.

  It was therefore the more agreeable that, on this same raw, grey Saturday morning, when Norry’s temper had been unusually tried by a search for the nest of an out-lying hen, Mary Holloran, the Rosemount lodgewoman, should have walked into the kitchen.

  “God save all here!” she said, sinking on to a chair, and wiping away with her apron the tears that the east wind had brought to her eyes; “I’m as tired as if I was afther walking from Galway with a bag o’ male!”

  “Musha, then, cead failthe, Mary,” replied Norry with unusual geniality; “is it from Judy Lee’s wake ye’re comin’?”

  “I am, in throth; Lord ha’ mercy on her!” Mary Holloran raised her eyes to the ceiling and crossed herself, and Norry and Bid Sal followed her example. Norry was sitting by the fire singeing the yellow carcase of a hen, and the brand of burning paper in her hand heightened the effect of the gesture in an almost startling way. “Well now,” resumed Mary Holloran, “she was as nice a woman as ever threw a tub of clothes on the hill, and an honest poor crayture through all. She battled it out well, as owld as she was.”

  “Faith thin, an’ if she did die itself she was in the want of it,” said Norry sardonically; “sure there isn’t a winther since her daughther wint to America that she wasn’t anointed a couple of times. I’m thinkin’ the people th’ other side o’ death will be throuncin’ her for keepin’ them waitin’ on her this way!”

  Mary Holloran laughed a little and then wiped her face with the corner of her apron, and sighed so as to restore a fitting tone to the conversation.

  “The neighbours was all gethered in it last night,” she observed; “they had the two rooms full in it, an’ a half gallon of whisky, and porther and all sorts. Indeed, her sisther’s two daughthers showed her every respect; there wasn’t one comin’ in it, big nor little, but they’d fill them out a glass o’ punch before they’d sit down. God bless ye, Bid Sal,” she went on, as if made thirsty by the recollection; “have ye a sup o’ tay in that taypot that’s on th’ oven? I’d drink the lough this minute!”

  “Is it the like o’ that ye’d give the woman?” vociferated Norry in furious hospitality, as Bid Sal moved forward to obey this behest; “make down the fire and bile a dhrop o’ wather the way she’ll get what’ll not give her a sick shtummuck. Sure, what’s in that pot’s the lavin’s afther Miss Charlotte’s breakfast for Billy Grainy when he comes with the post; and good enough for the likes of him.”

  “There was a good manny axing for ye last night,” began Mary Holloran again, while Bid Sal broke up a box with the kitchen cleaver, and revived the fire with its fragments and a little paraffin oil. “And you a near cousin o’ the corp’. Was it herself wouldn’t let you in it?”

  “Whether she’d let me in it or no I have plenty to do besides running to every corp’-house in the counthry,” returned Norry with an acerbity that showed how accurate Mary Holloran’s surmise had been; “if thim that was in the wake seen me last night goin’ out to t
he cow that’s afther calvin’ with the quilt off me bed to put over her, maybe they’d have less chat about me.”

  Mary Holloran was of a pacific turn, and she tried another topic. “Did ye hear that John Kenealy was afther summonsing me mother before the binch?” she said, unfastening her heavy blue cloak and putting her feet up on the fender of the range.

  “Ah, God help ye, how would I hear annything?” grumbled Norry; “it’d be as good for me to be in heaven as to be here, with ne’er a one but Nance the Fool comin’ next or nigh me.”

  “Oh, indeed, that’s the thruth,” said Mary Holloran with polite but transient sympathy. “Well, whether or no, he summonsed her, and all the raison he had for putting that scandal on her, was thim few little hins and ducks she have, that he seen different times on his land, themselves and an owld goat thravellin’ the fields, and not a bit nor a bite before them in it that they’d stoop their heads to, only what sign of grass was left afther the winther, and faith! that’s little. ‘Twas last Tuesday, Lady Day an’ all, me mother was bringin’ in a goaleen o’ turf, an’ he came thundherin’ round the house, and every big rock of English he had he called it to her, and every soort of liar and blagyard —oh, indeed, his conduck was not fit to tell to a jackass —an’ he summonsed her secondly afther that. Ye’d think me mother’d lose her life when she seen the summons, an’ away she legged it into Rosemount to meself, the way I’d spake to the masther to lane heavy on Kenealy the day he’d bring her into coort. ‘An’ indeed,’ says I to the masther, ‘is it to bring me mother into coort!’ says I; ‘sure she’s hardly able to lave the bed,’ says I, ‘an owld little woman that’s not four stone weight! She’s not that size,’ says I—” Mary Holloran measured accurately off the upper joints of her first two fingers—“‘Sure ye’d blow her off yer hand! And Kenealy sayin’ she pelted the pavement afther him, and left a backward sthroke on him with the shovel!’ says I. But, in any case the masther gave no satisfaction to Kenealy, and he arbithrated him the way he wouldn’t be let bring me mother into coort, an’ two shillin’ she paid for threspass, and thank God she’s able to do that same, for as desolate as Kenealy thinks her.”