“Eliza,” she called out, “have ye a kettle boiling down there? Ah, that’s right—” as Eliza answered in the affirmative. “I never knew a well kept kitchen yet without boiling water in it! I’m chilled to me bones, Eliza,” she continued, “I wonder could you put your hand on a drop of spirits anywhere, and I’d ask ye for a drop of hot grog to keep the life in me, and” —as Eliza started with hospitable speed in search of the materials,—”let me mix it meself, like a good woman; I know very well I’d be in the lock-up before night if I drank what you’d brew for me!”
Retiring on this jest, Miss Mullen returned to the study, and was sitting over the fire with a newspaper when the refreshment she had asked for was brought in.
“I cut ye a sandwich to eat with it, miss,” said Eliza Hackett, on whom Charlotte’s generosity in the matter of Mrs. Lambert’s clothing had not been thrown away; “I know meself that as much as the smell itself o’ sperrits would curdle under me nose, takin’ them on an empty stomach. Though, indeed, if ye walked Lismoyle ye’d get no better brandy than what’s in that little bottle. ‘Tis out o’ the poor mistress’s medicine chest I got it. Well, well, she’s where she won’t want brandy now!”
Eliza withdrew a well-ordered sig, that, as Charlotte knew, was expressive of future as well as past regret, and Mr. Lambert’s “oldest friend” was left in sole possession of his study. She first proceeded to mix herself a tumbler of brandy and water, and then she lifted the lid of the brass punch kettle, and taking one of the envelopes that contained the bank books she held it in the steam till the gum of the flap melted. The book in it was Lambert’s private banking account, and Charlotte studied it for some time with greedy interest, comparing the amounts of the drafts and cash payments with the dates against each. Then she opened the other envelope, keeping a newspaper ready at hand to throw over the books in case of interruption, and found, as she had anticipated, that it was the bank book of the Dysart estate. After this she settled down to hard work for half an hour, comparing one book with another, making lists of figures, sipping her brandy and water meanwhile, and munching Eliza Hackett’s sandwiches. Having learned what she could of the bank books, she fastened them up in their envelopes, and, again having recourse to the kettle that was simmering on the hob, she made, with slow, unslaked avidity, an examination of some of the other letters on the table. When everything was tidy again she leaned back in the chair, and remained in deep meditation over her paper of figures, until the dining-room clock sent a muffled reminder through the wall that it was two o’clock.
Ferry Row had, since Charlotte’s change of residence, breathed a freer air. Even her heavy washing was now done at home, and her visits to her tenantry might be looked forward to only when rents were known to be due. There was nothing that they expected less than that, on this wet afternoon, so soon, too, after a satisfactory quarter day, they should hear the well-known rattle of the old phaeton, and see Miss Mullen, in her equally well-known hat and waterproof, driving slowly past house after house, until she arrived at the disreputable abode of Dinny Lydon, the tailor. Having turned the cushions of the phaeton upside down to keep them dry, Miss Mullen knocked at the door, and was admitted by Mrs. Lydon, a very dirty woman, with a half-finished waistcoat over her arm.
“Oh, ye’re welcome, Miss Mullen, ye’re welcome! Come in out o’ the rain, asthore,” she said, with a manner as greasy as her face. “Himself have the coat waitin’ on ye these three days to thry on.”
“Then I’m afraid the change for death must be on Dinny if he’s beginning to keep his promises,” replied Charlotte, adventuring herself fearlessly into the dark interior. “I’d be thrown out in all me calculations, Dinny, if ye give up telling me lies.”
This was addressed through a reeking fog of tobacco smoke to a half-deformed figure seated on a table by the window.
“Oh, with the help o’ God I’ll tell yer honour a few lies yet before I die,” replied Dinny Lydon, removing his pipe and the hat which, for reasons best known to himself, he wore while at work, and turning on Charlotte a face that, no less than his name, told of Spanish, if not Jewish blood.
“Well, that’s the truth, anyway,” said Charlotte, with a friendly laugh; “but I won’t believe in the coat being ready till I see it. Didn’t ye lose your apprentice since I saw ye?”
“Is it that yound gobsther?” rejoined Mrs. Lydon acridly, as she tendered her unsavoury assistance to Charlotte in the rermoval of her waterproof; “if that one was in the house yer coat wouldn’t be finished in a twelvemonth with all the time Dinny lost cursing him. Faith! it was last week he hysted his sails and away with him. Mind ye, ‘twas he was the first-class puppy!”
“Was it the trade he didn’t like?” asked Charlotte; “or was it the skelpings he got from Dinny?”
“Throth, it was not, but two plates in the sate of his breeches was what he faulted, and the divil mend him!”
“Two plates!” exclaimed Charlotte, in not unnatural bewilderment; “what in the name of fortune was he doing with them?”
“Well, indeed, Miss Mullen, with respex t’ye, when he came here he hadn’t as much rags on him as’d wipe a candlestick,” replied Mrs. Lydon, with fluent spitefulness; “yerself knows that ourselves has to be losing with puttin’ clothes on thim apprentices, an’ feedin’ them as lavish and as natty as ye’d feed a young bonnuf, an’ afther all they’d turn about an’ say they never got so much as the wettin’ of their mouths of male nor tay nor praties—” Mrs. Lydon replenished her lungs with a long breath,—”and this lad the biggest dandy of then all, that wouldn’t be contint without Dinny’d cut the brea’th of two fingers out of a lovely throusers that was a little sign bulky on him and was gethered into nate plates—”
“Oh, it’s well known beggars can’t bear heat,” said Charlotte, interrupting for purposes of her own a story that threatened to expand unprofitably, “and that was always the way with all the M’Donaghs. Didn’t I meet that lad’s cousin, Shamus Bawn, driving a new side-car this morning, and his father only dead a week. I suppose now he’s got the money he thinks he’ll never get to the end of it, though indeed it isn’t so long since I heard he was looking for money, and found it hard enough to get it.”
Mrs. Lydon gave a laugh of polite acquiescence, and wondered inwardly whether Miss Mullen had as intimate a knowledge of everyone’s affairs as she seemed to have of Shamus Bawn’s.
“Oh, they say a manny a thing—” she obsereved with well-simulated inanity “Arrah! dheen dheffeth, Dinny! thurrum cussoge um’na.”
“Yes, hurry on and give me the coat, Dinny,” said Charlotte, displaying that knowledge of Irish that always came as a shock to those who were uncertain as to its limitations.
The tailor untwisted his short legs and descended’ stiffly to the floor, and having helped Charlotte into the coat, pushed her into the light of the open door, and surveyed his handiwork with his large head on one side, and the bitten ends of thread still hanging on his lower lip.
“It turrned well,” he said, passing his hand approvingly over Miss Mullen’s thick shoulder; “afther all, the good stuff’s the best; that’s fine honest stuff that’ll wear forty of thim other thrash. That’s the soort that’ll shtand”
“To the death!” interjected Mrs. Lydon fervently.
“How many wrinkles are there in the back?” said Charlotte; “tell me the truth now, Dinny, remember ‘twas only last week you were ‘making your sowl’ at the mission.”
“Tchah!” said Dinny Lydon contemptuously, “it’s little I regard the mission, but I wouldn’t be bothered tellin’ ye lies about the likes o’ this,” surreptitiously smoothing as he spoke a series of ridges above the hips; “that’s a grand clane back as ever I see.”
“How independent he is about his missions!” said Charlotte jibingly. “Ha! Dinny me man, if you were sick you’d be the first to be roaring for the priest!”
“Faith, divil a roar,” returned the atheistical Dinny; “if I couldn’t knock the stone o
ut of the gap for meself, the priest couldn’t do it for me.”
“Oh, Gaad! Dinny, have conduct before Miss Mullen!” cried Mrs. Lydon.
“He may say what he likes, if he wouldn’t drop candle grease on my jacket,” said Charlotte, who had taken off the coat and was critically examining every seam; “or, indeed, Mrs. Lydon, I believe it was yourself did it!” she exclaimed, suddenly intercepting an indescribable glance of admonition from Mrs. Dinny to her husband; “that’s wax candle grease! I believe you wore it yourself at Michael M’Donagh’s wake, and that’s why it was finished four days ago.”
Mrs. Lydon uttered a shriek of merriment at the absurdity of the suggestion, and then fell to disclaimers so voluble as at once to convince Miss Mullen of her guilt. The accusation was not pressed home, and Dinny’s undertaking to remove the grease with a hot iron was accepted with surprising amiability. Charlotte sat down on a chair whose shattered frame bore testimony to the renowned violence of Mrs. Lydon when under the influence of liquor, and encouraging the singed and half-starved cat on to her lap, she addressed herself to conversation.
“Wasn’t Michael M’Donagh husband to your mother’s cousin?” she said to the tailor; “I’m told he had a very large funeral.”
“He had that,” answered Dinny, pushing the black hair back from his high forehead, and looking more than ever like a Jewish rabbi; “three priests, an’ five an’ twenty cars, an’ fifteen pounds of althar money.”
“Well, the three priests have a right to pray their big best for him, with five pounds apiece in their pockets,” remarked Charlotte; “I suppose it was the M’Donagh side gave the most of the altar. Those brothers of old Michael’s are all stinking of money.”
“Oh, they’re middlin’ snug,” said Dinny, who had just enough family feeling for the M’Donaghs to make him chary of admitting their wealth; “annyway, they’re able to slap down their five shillins or their ten shillin’ bit upon the althar as well as another.”
“Who got the land?” asked Charlotte, stroking the cat’s filthy head, and thereby perfuming her fingers with salt fish.
“Oh, how do I know what turning and twisting of keys there was in it afther himself dyin’?” said the tailor, with the caution which his hearers understood to be a fatiguing but inevitable convention; “they say the daughter got the biggest half, an’ Shamus Bawn got the other. There’s where the battle’ll be between them.” He laughed sardonically, as he held up the hot iron and spat upon it to ascertain its heat.
“He’d better let his sister alone,” said Charlotte. “Shamus Bawn has more land this minute than he has money enough to stock, with that farm he got from Mr. Lambert the other day, without trying to get more.”
“Oh, Jim’s not so poor altogether that he couldn’t bring the law on her if he’d like,” said Dinny, immediately resenting the slighting tone; “he got a good lump of a furtune with the wife.”
“Ah, what’s fifty pounds,” said Charlotte scornfully. “I daresay he wanted every penny of it to pay the fine on Knocklara.”
“Arrah, fifty pounds! God help ye!” exclaimed Dinny Lydon with superior scorn. “No, but a hundhred an’ eighty was what he put down on the table to Lambert for it, and it’s little but he had to give the two hundhred itself.”
Mrs. Lydon looked up from the hearth where she was squatted, fanning the fire with her red petticoat to heat another iron for her husband. “Sure I know Dinny’s safe tellin’ it to a lady,” she said, rolling her dissolute cunning eye from her husband to Miss Mullen; “but ye’ll not spake of it asthore. Jimmy had some dhrink taken when he shown Dinny the docket, because Lambert said he wouldn’t give the farm so chape to e’er a one but Jimmy, an’ indeed Jimmy’d break every bone in our body if he got the wind of a word that ‘twas through us the neighbours had it to say he had that much money with him. Jimmy’s very close in himself that way.”
Charlotte laughed good-humouredly. “Oh, there’s no fear of me, Mrs. Lydon. It’s no affair of mine either way,” she said reassuringly. “Here, hurry with me jacket, Dinny, I’ll be glad enough to have it on me going home.”
* * *
CHAPTER XLII.
Sir Benjamin Dysart’s funeral was an event of the past. It was a full three weeks since the family vault in Lismoyle Churchyard had closed its door upon that ornament of county society; Lady Dysart’s friends were beginning to recover from the strain of writing letters of condolence to her on her bereavement, and Christopher, after sacrificing to his departed parent’s memory a week of perfect sailing weather, had had his boat painted, and had relapsed into his normal habit of spending as much of his time as was convenient on the lake.
There was still the mingled collapse and stir in the air that comes between the end of an old regime and the beginning of a new. Christopher had resigned his appointment at Copenhagen, feeling that his life would, for the future, be vaguely filled with new duties and occupations, but he had not as yet discovered anything very novel to do beyond signing his name a good many times, and trying to become accustomed to hearing himself called Sir Christopher; occupations that seemed rather elementary in the construction of a career. His want of initiative energy in every-day matters kept him motionless and apathetic, waiting for his new atmosphere to make itself palpable to him, and prepared to resign himself to its conditions. He even, in his unquenchable self-consciousness, knew that it would be wholesome for him if these were such as he least liked; but, in the meantime, he remained passively unsettled, and a letter from Lord Castlemore, in which his tact and conscientiousness as a secretary were fully set forth, roused no outside ambition in him. He re-read it on a shimmering May morning, with one arm hanging over the tiller of his boat, as she crept with scarcely breathing sails through the pale streaks of calm that lay like dreams upon the lake. He was close under the woods of Bruff, close enough to feel how still and busy they were in the industry of spring. It seemed to him that the sound of the insects was like the humming of her loom, and almost mechanically he turned over the envelope of Lord Castlemore’s letter, and began in the old familiar way to scrawl a line or two on the back of it.
The well-known crest, however, disconcerted his fancy, and he fell again to ruminating upon the letter itself. If this expressed the sum of his abilities, diplomatic life was certainly not worth living. Tact and conscientiousness were qualities that would grace the discharge of a doctor’s butler, and might be expected from anyone of the most ordinary intelligence. He could not think that his services to his country, as concentrated in Lord Castlemore, were at all remarkable; they had given him far less trouble than the most worthless of those efforts in prose and verse, that, as he thought contemptuously, were like the skeletons that mark the desert course of a caravan; he did not feel the difficulty, and he, therefore, thought the achievement small. A toying breeze fluttered the letter in his hand, and the boat tilted languidly in recognition of it. The water began to murmur about the keel, and Christopher presently found himself gliding smoothly towards the middle of the lake.
He looked across at Lismoyle, spreading placidly along the margin of the water, and as he felt the heat of the sun and the half-forgotten largeness of summer in the air, he could have believed himself back in the August of last year, and he turned his eyes to the trees of Rosemount as if the sight of them would bring disillusionment. it was some time now since he had first been made ashamed of the discovery that disillusionment also meant relief. For some months he had clung to his dream; at first helplessly, with a sore heart, afterwards with a more conscious taking hold, as of something gained, that made life darker, but for ever richer. It had been torture to drive away from Tally Ho with the knowledge that Hawkins was preferred to him, torture of the most simple, unbearable kind; but sentiment had deftly usurped the place of his blind suffering, and that stage came that is almost inevitable with poetic natures, when the artistic sense can analyse sorrow, and sees the beauty of defeat. Then he had heard that Francie was going to Marry Lambert, and the news had done
more in one moment to disillusion him than common sense could do in years. The thought stung him with a kind of horror for her that she could tolerate such a fate as marrying Roddy Lambert. He knew nothing of the tyrannies of circumstance. To prosperous young men like Christopher, poverty, except barefooted and in rage, is a name, and unpaid bills a joke. That Albatross Villa could have driven her to the tremendous surrender of marriage was a thing incredible. All that was left for him to believe was that he had been mistaken, and that the lucent quality that he thought he had found in her soul had existed only in his imagination. Now when he thought of her face it was with a curious half-regret that so beautiful a thing should no longer have any power to move him. Some sense of loss remained,but it was charged with self-pity for the loss of an ideal. Another man in Christopher’s position would not probably have troubled himself about ideals, but Christopher, fortunately, or unfortunately for him, was not like other men.
The fact must even be faced that he had probably never been in love with her, according to the common acceptation of the term. His intellect exhausted his emotions and killed them with solicitude, as a child digs up a flower to see if it is growing, and his emotions themselves had a feminine refinement, but lacked the feminine quality of unreasoning pertinacity. From self-pity for the loss of an ideal to gratitude for an escape is not far to go, and all that now remained to him of bitterness was a gentle self-contempt for his own inadequacy in falling in love, as in everything else.
It may be imagined that in Lismoyle Francie was a valued and almost invariable topic of conversation. Each visitor to Rosemount went there in the character of a scout, and a detailed account of her interview was published on every possible occasion.
The Real Charlotte Page 37
