“Lambert’s a fine arbithrator,” said Norry, dispassionately. “Here, Bid Sal, run away out to the lardher and lave this within in it,” handing over the singed hen, “and afther that, go on out and cut cabbages for the pigs. Divil’s cure to ye! Can’t ye make haste! I suppose ye think it’s to be standin’ lookin’ at the people that ye get four pounds a year an’ yer dite! Thim gerrls is able to put annyone that’d be with them into a decay,” she ended, as Bid Sal reluctantly withdrew, “and there’s not a word ye’ll say but they’ll gallop through the counthry tellin’ it.” Then, dropping into a conversational tone, “Nance was sayin’ Lambert was gone to Dublin agin, but what signifies what the likes of her’d say, it couldn’t be he’d be goin’ in it agin and he not home a week from it.”
Mary Holloran pursed up her mouth portentously.
“Faith he could go in it, and it’s in it he’s gone,” she said, beginning upon a new cup of tea, as dark and sweet as treacle, that Norry had prepared for her. “Ah musha! Lord have mercy on thim that’s gone; ‘tis short till they’re forgotten!”
Norry contented herself with an acquiescing sound, devoid of interrogation, but dreary enough to be encouraging. Mrs. Holloran’s saucer had received half the contents of her cup, and was now delicately poised aloft on the outspread fingers of her right hand, while her right elbow rested on the table according to the etiquette of her class, and Norry knew that the string of her friend’s tongue would loosen of its own accord.
“Seven months last Monday,” began Mary Holloran in the voice of a professional reciter; “seven months since he berrid her, an’ if he gives three more in the widda ye may call me a liar.”
“Tell the truth!” exclaimed Norry, startled out of her self-repression and stopping short in the act of poking the fire. “D’ye tell me it’s to marry again he’d go, an’ the first wife’s clothes on his cook this minnit?”
Mary Holloran did not reveal by look or word the gratification that she felt. “God forbid I’d rise talk or dhraw scandal,” she continued with the same pregnant calm, “but the thruth it is an’ no slandher, for the last month there’s not a week—arrah what week! No, but there’s hardly the day, but a letther goes to the post for—for one you know well, an’ little boxeens and rejestered envelopes an’ all sorts. An’ letthers coming from that one to him to further ordhers! Sure I’d know the writin’. Hav’nt she her name written the size of I don’t know what on her likeness that he have shtuck out on the table.”
Mary Holloran broke off like a number of a serial story, with a carefully interrupted situation, and sipped her tea assiduously. Norry advanced slowly from the fireplace with the poker still clutched in her hand, and her glowing eyes fixed upon her friend, as if she were stalking her.
“For the love o’ God, woman!” she whispered, “is it Miss Francie?”
“Now ye have it,” said Mary Holloran.
Norry clasped her hands, poker and all, and raised them in front of her face, while her eyes apparently communed with a familiar spirit at the other end of the kitchen. They puzzled Mary Holloran, who fancied she discerned in them a wild and quite irrelevant amusement, but before further opinions could be interchanged, a dragging step was heard at the back door, a fumbling hand lifted the latch, and Billy Grainy came in with the post-bag over his shoulder and an empty milk-can in his hand.
“Musha, more power to ye, Billy!” said Mary Holloran, concealing her disgust at the interruption with laudable good breeding, and making a grimace of lightning quickness at Norry, expressive of the secrecy that was to be observed; “‘tis you’re the grand post-boy!”
“Och thin I am,” mumbled Billy sarcastically, as he let the post-bag slip from his shoulders to the table, “divil a boot nor a leg is left on me with the thravelling!” He hobbled over to the fireplace, and, taking the teapot off the range, looked into it suspiciously. “This is a quare time o’ day for a man to be atin’ his breakfast! Divil dom the bit I’d ate in this house agin’ if it wasn’t for the nathure I have for the place—”
Norry banged open a cupboard, and took from it a mug with some milk in it, and a yellow pie-dish, in which were several stale ends of loaves.
“Take it or lave it afther ye!” she said, putting them down on the table. “If ye had nathure for risin’ airly out o’ yer bed the tay wouldn’t be waitin’ on ye this way, an’ if ourselves can’t plaze ye, ye can go look for thim that will. ‘Thim that’s onaisy let thim quit!’” Norry cared little whether Billy Grainy was too deaf to take in this retort or no. Mary Holloran and her own self-respect were alike gratified, and taking up the post-bag she proceeded with it to the dining-room.
“Well, Norry,” said Charlotte jocularly, looking round from the bookshelf that she was tidying, “is it only now that old thief’s brought the post? or have ye been flirting with him in the kitchen all this time?”
Norry retired from the room with a snarl of indescribable scorn, and Charlotte unlocked the bag and drew forth its contents. There were three letters for her, and she laid one of them aside at once while she read the other two. One was from a resident in Ferry Lane, an epistle that began startlingly, “Honored Madman,” and slanted over two sides of the note-paper in lamentable entreaties for a reduction of the rent and a little more time to pay it in. The other was an invitation from Mrs. Corkran to meet a missionary, and tossing both down with an equal contempt, she addressed herself to the remaining one. She was in the act of opening it when she caught sight of the printed name of a hotel upon its flap, and she suddenly became motionless, her eyes staring at the name, and her face slowly reddening all over.
“Bray!” she said between her teeth, “what takes him to Bray, when he told me to write to him to the Shelbourne?”
She opened the letter, a long and very neatly written one, so neat, in fact, as to give to a person who knew Mr. Lambert’s handwriting in all its phases the idea of very unusual care and a rough copy.
“My dear Charlotte,” it began, “I know you will be surprised at the news I have to tell you in this letter, and so will many others; indeed I am almost surprised at it myself.” Charlotte’s left hand groped backwards till it caught the back of a chair and held on to it, but her eyes still flew along the lines. “You are my oldest and best friend, and so you are the first I would like to tell about it, and I would value your good wishes far beyond any others that might be offered to me, especially as I hope you will soon be my relation as well as my friend. I am engaged to Francie Fitzpatrick, and we are to be married as soon as possible.”
The reader sat heavily down upon the chair behind her, her colour fading from red to a dirty yellow as she read on. “I am aware that many will say that I am not showing proper respect towards poor dear Lucy in doing this, but you, or any one that knew her well, will support me in saying that I never was wanting in that to her when she was alive, and that she would be the last to wish I should live a lonely and miserable life now that she is gone. It is a great pleasure to me to think that she always had such a liking for Francie, for her own sake as well as because she was your cousin. It was my intention to have put off the marriage for a year, but I heard a couple of days ago from Robert Fitzpatrick that the investment that Francie’s little fortune had been put into was in a very shaky state, and that there is no present chance of dividends from it. He offered to let her live with them as usual, but they have not enough to support themselves. Francie was half starved there, and it is no place for her to be, and so we have arranged to be married very quietly down here at Bray, on the twentieth—just a week from to-day. I will take her to London, or perhaps a little farther for a week or so, and about the first or second week in April I hope to be back in Rosemount. I know my dear Charlotte, my dear old friend, that this must appear a sudden and hasty step, but I have considered it well and thoroughly. I know too that when Francie left your house there was some trifling little quarrel between you, but I trust that you will forget all about that, and that you will be the first to welcome her w
hen she returns to her new home. She begs me to say that she is sorry for anything she said to annoy you, and would write to you if she thought you would like to hear from her. I hope you will be as good a friend to her as you have always been to me, and will be ready to help and advise her in her new position. I would be greatly obliged to you if you would let the Lismoyle people know of my marriage, and of the reasons that I have told you for hurrying it on this way; you know yourself how glad they always are to get hold of the wrong end of a story. I am going to write to Lady Dysart myself. Now, my dear Charlotte, I must close this letter. The above will be my address for a week, and I will be very anxious to hear from you. With much love from Francie and myself, I remain your attached friend,
“Roderick Lambert.”
A human soul when it has broken away from its diviner part, and is left to the anarchy of the lower passions, is a poor and humiliating spectacle, and it is unfortunate that in its animal want of self-control it is seldom without a ludicrous aspect. The weak side of Charlotte’s nature was her ready abandonment of herself to fury that was, as often as not, wholly incompatible with its cause, and now that she had been dealt the hardest blow that life could give her, there were a few minutes in which rage, and hatred, and thwarted passion took her in their fierce hands, and made her, for the time, a wild beast. When she came to herself she was standing by the chimney-piece, panting and trembling; the letter lay in pieces on the rug, torn by her teeth, and stamped here and there with the semicircle of her heel; a chair was lying on its side on the floor, and Mrs. Bruff was crouching aghast under the sideboard, looking out at her mistress with terrified inquiry.
Charlotte raised her hand and drew it across her mouth with the unsteadiness of a person in physical pain, then, grasping the edge of the chimney-piece, she laid her forehead upon it and drew a few long shuddering breaths. It is probable that if anyone had then come into the room, the human presence, with its mysterious electric quality, would have drawn the storm outwards in a burst of hysterics; but solitude seems to be a non-conductor, and a parched sob, that was strangled in its birth by an imprecation, was the only sound that escaped from her. As she lifted her head again her eyes met those of a large cabinet photograph of Lambert that stared brilliantly at her with the handsome fatuity conferred by an overtouched negative. It was a recent one, taken during one of those recent visits to Dublin whose object had been always so plausibly explained to her, and, as she looked at it, the biting thought of how she had been hoodwinked and fooled, by a man to whom she had all her life laid down the law, drove her half mad again. She plucked it out of its frame with her strong fingers, and thrust it hard down into the smouldering fire.
“If it was hell I’d do the same for you!” she said, with a moan like some furious feline creature, as she watched the picture writhe in the heat, “and for her too!” She took up the poker, and with it drove and battered the photograph into the heart of the fire, and then, flinging down the poker with a crash that made Louisa jump as she crossed the hall, she sat down at the dinner-table and made her first effort at self-control.
“His old friend!” she said, gasping and choking over the words; “the cur, the double-dyed cur! Lying and cringing to me, and borrowing my money, and—and—”—even to herself she could not now admit that he had gulled her into believing that he would eventually marry her—”and sneaking after her behind my back all the time! And now he sends me her love—her love! Oh, my God Almighty—” she tried to laugh, but instead of laughter came tears, as she saw herself helpless, and broken, and aimless for the rest of her life—”I won’t break down—I won’t break down—” she said, grinding her teeth together with the effort to repress her sobs. She staggered blindly to the sideboard, and, unlocking it, took out a bottle of brandy. She put the bottle to her mouth and took a long gulp from it, while the tears ran down her face.
* * *
CHAPTER XL.
Sometimes there comes in Paris towards the beginning of April a week or two of such weather as is rarely seen in England before the end of May. The horse-chestnut buds break in vivid green against the sober blue of the sky, there is a warmth about the pavements that suggests the coming blaze of summer, the gutter-rivulets and the fountains sparkle with an equal gaiety, and people begin to have their coffee out of doors again. The spring, that on the day Francie was married at Bray, was still mainly indicated by east wind and fresh mackerel, was burgeoning in the woods at Versailles with a hundred delicate surprises of blossom and leaf and thick white storm of buds, and tourists were being forced, like asparagus, by the fine weather, and began to appear in occasional twos and threes on the wide square in front of the palace. A remnant of the winter quiet still hung over everything, and a score or two of human beings, dispersed through the endless rooms and gardens, only made more emphatic the greatness of the extent, and of the solitude. They certainly did not bring much custom to the little woman who had been beguiled by the fine weather to set up her table of cakes and oranges in a sunny angle of the palace wall, and sat by it all day, picturesque and patient in her white cap, while her strip of embroidery lengthened apace in the almost unbroken leisure. Even the first Sunday of April, from which she had hoped great things, brought her, during many bland and dazzling hours, nothing except the purchase of a few sous worth of sweets, and the afternoon was well advanced before she effected a sale of any importance. A tall gentleman, evidently a Monsieur Anglais, was wandering about, and she called to him to tell him of the excellence of her brioches and the beauty of her oranges. Ordinarily she had not found that English gentlemen were attracted by her wares, but there was something helpless about this one that gave her confidence. He came up to her table and inspected its dainties with bewildered disfavour, while a comfortable clink of silver came from the pocket in which one hand was fumbling.
“Pain d’épices! Des gâteaux! Ver’ goot, ver’ sveet!” she said encouragingly, bringing forth her entire English vocabulary with her most winning smile.
“I wish to goodness I knew what the beastly things are made of,” the Englishman murmured to himself. “I can’t go wrong with oranges anyhow. Er—cela, et cela s’il vous plait,” producing in his turn his whole stock of French, “combieng.” He had only indicated two oranges, but the little woman had caught the anxious glance at her cakes, and without more ado chose out six of the most highly-glazed brioches, and by force of will and volubility made her customer not only take them but pay her two francs for them and the oranges.
The tall Englishman strode away round the corner of the palace with these provisions, and along the great terrace towards a solitary figure sitting forlornly at the top of one of the flights of steps that drop in noble succession down to the expanses of artificial water that seem to stretch away into the heart of France.
“I couldn’t find anywhere to get tea,” he said as soon as he was within speaking distance; “I couldn’t find anything but an old woman selling oranges, and I got you some of those, and she made me get some cakes as well—I don’t know if they’re fit to eat.”
Mr. Lambert spoke with a very unusual timorousness, as he placed his sticky purchases in Francie’s lap, and sat down on the step beside her.
“Oh, thank you awfully, Roddy, I’m sure they’re lovely,” she answered, looking at her husband with a smile that was less spontaneous than it used to be, and looking away again immediately.
There was something ineffably wearying to her in the adoring, proprietary gaze that she found so unfailingly fixed upon her whenever she turned her eyes towards him; it seemed to isolate her from other people and set her upon a ridiculous pedestal, with one foolish worshipper declaiming his devotion with the fervour and fatuity of those who for two hours shouted the praises of Diana of the Ephesians. The supernatural mist that blurs the irksome and the ludicrous till it seems like a glory was not before her eyes; every outline was clear to her, with the painful distinctness of a caricature.
“I don’t think you could eat the oranges here,
” he said, “they’d be down on us for throwing the skins about. Are you too tired to come on down into the gardens where they wouldn’t spot us?” He laid his hand on hers, “You are tired. What fools we were to go walking round all those infernal rooms! Why didn’t you say you’d had enough of it?”
Francie was aching with fatigue from walking slowly over leagues of polished floor, with her head thrown back in perpetual perfunctory admiration of gilded ceilings and battle pictures, but she got up at once, as much to escape from the heavy warmth of his hand as from the mental languor that made discussion an effort. They went together down the steps, too much jaded by uncomprehended sight-seeing to take heed of the supreme expression of art in nature that stretched out before them in mirrors of Triton and dolphin-guarded water, and ordered masses of woodland, and walked slowly along a terrace till they came to another flight of steps that fell suddenly from the stately splendours of the terraces down to the simplicities of a path leading into a grove of trees.
The Real Charlotte Page 35
