The Real Charlotte

by Edith Somerville

  “Very well; never say I didn’t make you a good offer,” she answered, her unconquerable eyes giving him a look that told she could still flirt with her husband.

  “Put my cloak on me, Roddy; the evening’s getting cold.”

  They drove on quickly, and Lambert felt the gloom settling down upon him again. He hated going away and leaving Francie; he hated his financial difficulties, and their tortuous, uncertain issues; and, above all, he hated Hawkins. He would have given the world to know how things had been between him and Francie last year; anything would be less intolerable than suspicion.

  The strip of grass by the roadside widened as they left the rocky country, and the deep dints of galloping hoofs became apparent on it. Lambert pointed to them with his whip, and laughed contemptuously.

  “If I had a thick-winded pony like your friend Mr. Hawkins, I wouldn’t bucket her up hill in that sort of way. She’d do well enough if he had the sense to take her easy; but in all my knowledge of soldiers— and I’ve seen a good few of them here now—I’ve never seen a more self-sufficient jackass in the matter of horses than Hawkins. I wouldn’t trust him with a donkey.”

  “You’d better tell him so,” said Francie, indifferently. Lambert chose to suspect a sneer in the reply.

  “Tell him so!” he said hotly. “I’d tell him so pretty smart, if I thought there was a chance of his getting outside a horse of mine. But I think it’ll be a long day before that happens!”

  “Maybe he wouldn’t thank you for one of your horses.”

  “No, I’ll bet he wouldn’t say thank you,” said Lambert, a thrill of anger darting to his brain. “He’s a lad that’ll take all he can get and say nothing about it, and chuck it away to the devil when he’s done with it.”

  “I’m sure I don’t care what he does!” exclaimed Francie, with excusable impatience. “I wonder if he’s able to get into a passion about nothing, the way you’re doing now!”

  “It didn’t look this afternoon as if you cared so little about what he does!” said Lambert, his breath coming short. “May I ask if you knew he was coming, that you were in such a hurry back to the house to meet him? I suppose you settled it when he came to see you on Saturday.”

  “Since you know all about it, there’s no need for me to contradict you!” Francie flashed back.

  One part of Lambert knew that he was making a fool of himself, but the other part, which was unfortunately a hundred times the stronger, drove him on.

  “Oh, I daresay you found it very pleasant, talking over old times,” he retorted, releasing the thought at last like a long caged beast; “or was he explaining how it was he got tired of you?”

  Francie sat still and dumb; the light surface anger startled out of her in a moment, and its place taken by a suffocating sense of outrage and cruelty. She did not know enough of love to recognise it in this hideous disguise of jealousy; she only discerned the cowardly spitefulness, and it cut down to that deep place in her soul, where, since childhood, had lain her trust in him. She did not say a word, and Lambert went on:

  “Oh, I see you are too grand to answer me; I suppose it’s because I’m only your husband that you think I’m not worth talking to.” He gave the horse a lash of the whip, and then chucked up its head as it sprang forward, making the trap rock and jerk. The hateful satisfaction of taunting her about Hawkins was beginning to die on him like drunkenness, and he dimly saw what it was going to cost him. “You make me say these sort of things to you,” he broke out, seeing that she would not speak. “How can I help it, when you treat me like the dirt under your feet, and fight with me if Isay a word to you that you don’t like? I’d like to see the man that would stand it!”

  He looked down at her, and saw her head drooping forward, and her hand up to her face. He could not say more, as at that moment Mary Holloran was holding the gate open for him to drive in; and as he lifted his wife out of the trap at the hall door, and saw the tears that she could no longer hide from him, he knew that his punishment had begun, and the iron entered into his soul.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XLVI.

  A few days afterwards Lambert started on his rent-collecting tour. Peace of a certain sort was restored, complete in outward seeming, but with a hidden flaw that both knew and pretended to ignore. When Lambert sat by himself in the smoking-carriage of the morning train form Lismoyle, with the cold comfort of a farewell kiss still present with him, he was as miserable and anxious a man as could easily have been found. Charlotte had arrived the night before, and with all her agreeability had contrived to remind him that she expected a couple of hundred pounds on his return. He could never have believed that she would have dunned him in this way, and the idea occurred to him for the first time that she was perhaps taking this method of paying him out for what, in her ridiculous vanity, she might have imagined to be his bad treatment of her. But none the less, it was a comfort to him to think that she was at his house. He did not say so to himself, but he knew that he could not have found a better spy.

  Dislike, as has been said, was a sentiment that Francie found great difficulty in cultivating. She conducted a feud in the most slipshod way, with intervals of illogical friendship, of which anyone with proper self-respect would have been ashamed, and she consequently accepted, without reservation, the fact that Charlotte was making herself pleasant with a pleasantness that a more suspicious person would have felt to be unwholesome.

  Charlotte, upon whose birth so many bad fairies had shed their malign influence, had had at all events one attraction bestowed upon her, the gift of appreciation, and of being able to express her appreciation— a faculty that has been denied to many good and Christian people. The evil spirit may have torn her at sight of Francie enthroned at the head of Roddy Lambert’s table, but it did not come out of her in any palpable form, nor did it prevent her from enjoying to the utmost the change from the grease and smoke of Norry’s cooking, and the slothful stupidity of the Protestant orphan. Charlotte was one of the few women for whom a good cook will exert herself to make a savoury; and Eliza Hackett felt rewarded when the parlour-maid returned to the kitchen with the intelligence that Miss Mullen had taken two helpings of cheese-soufflé, and had sent her special compliments to its constructor. Another of the undoubted advantages of Rosemount was the chance it afforded Charlotte of paying off with dignity and ease the long arrears of visits that the growing infirmities of the black horse were heaping up against her. It was supremely bitter to hear Francie ordering out the waggonette as if she had owned horses and carriages all her life, but she could gulp it down for the sake of the compensating comfort and economy. In the long tête-à-têtes that these drives involved, Charlotte made herself surprisingly pleasant to her hostess. She knew every scandal about every family in the neighbourhood, and imparted them with a humour and an easy acquaintance with the aristocracy that was both awe-inspiring and encouraging to poor Francie, whose heart beat fast with shyness and conscious inferiority, as, card-case in hand, she preceded Miss Mullen to Mrs. Ffolliott’s or Mrs. Flood’s drawing-room. It modified the terror of Mrs. Flood’s hooked nose to remember that her mother had been a Hebrew barmaid, and it was some consolation to reflect that General Ffolliott’s second son had had to leave his regiment for cheating at cards, when she became aware that she alone, among a number of afternoon callers at Castle Ffolliott, had kept on her gloves during tea.

  In every conversation with Charlotte it seemed to Francie that she discovered, as if by accident, some small but disagreeable fact about her husband. He had been refused by such and such a girl; he had stuck so and so with a spavined horse; he had taken a drop too much at the hunt ball; and, in a general way, he owed the agency and his present position in society solely to the efforts of Miss Mullen and her father.

  Francie accepted these things, adding them to her previous store of disappointment in Roddy, with the philosophy that she had begun to learn in Albatross Villa, and that life was daily teaching her more of. They unconsciously made the
mselves into a background calculated to give the greatest effect to a figure that now occupied a great deal of her thoughts.

  It was at Mrs. Waller’s house that she first met Hawkins after her encounter with him at Gurthnamuckla. He came into the room when it was almost time for her to face the dreadful ordeal of leave-taking, and she presently found herself talking to him with considerably less agitation than she had felt in talking about Paris to Miss Waller. The memory of their last meeting kept her eyes from his, but it made the ground firm under her feet, and in the five minutes before she went away she felt that she had effectually shown him the place she intended him to occupy, and that he thoroughly understood that conversation with her was a grace, and not a right. The touch of deference and anxiety in his self-assured manner were as sweet to her as the flowers strewed before a conqueror, and laid themselves like balm on the wound of her husband’s taunt. Some day Roddy would see for himself the sort of way things were between her and Mr. Hawkins, she thought, as she drove down the avenue, and unconsciously held her head so high and looked so brilliant, that Charlotte, with that new-born amiability that Francie was becoming accustomed to, complimented her upon her colour, and declared that, after Major Waller’s attentions, she would have to write to Roderick and decline further responsibility as a chaperone.

  They drove to Bruff two or three days afterwards, to return the state visit paid by Pamela on her mother’s behalf, and, during some preliminary marketing in Lismoyle, they came upon Hawkins walking through the town in the Rosemount direction, with an air of smartness and purpose about him that bespoke an afternoon call.

  “I was just going to see you,” he said, looking rather blank.

  “We’re on our way to Bruff,” replied Francie, too resolved on upholding her dignity to condescend to any conventional regrets.

  Mr. Hawkins looked more cheerful, and observing that as he also owed a visit at Bruff this would be a good day to pay it, was turning back to the barracks for his trap when Miss Mullen intervened with almost childlike impulsiveness.

  “I declare now, it vexes my righteous soul to think of your getting out a horse and trap, with two seats, going a-begging here. It’s not my carriage, Mr. Hawkins, or I promise you you should have one of them.”

  Hawkins looked gratefully at her, and then uncertainly at Francie.

  “He’s welcome to come if he likes,” said Francie frigidly, thinking with a mixture of alarm and satisfaction of what Roddy would say if he heard of it.

  Hawkins waited for no further invitation, and got into the waggonette. A trait of character as old as humanity was at this time asserting itself, with singular freshness and force, in the bosom of Mr. Gerald Hawkins. He had lightly taken Francie’s heart in his hand, and as lightly thrown it away, without plot or premeditation; but now that another man had picked it up and kept it for his own, he began to see it as a thing of surpassing value. He could have borne with a not uninteresting regret the idea of Francie languishing somewhere in the suburbs of Dublin, and would even, had the chance come in his way, have flirted with her in a kind and consolatory manner. But to see her here, prosperous, prettier than ever, and possessing the supreme attraction of having found favour in someone else’s eyes, was a very different affair. The old glamour took him again, but with tenfold force, and, while he sat in the waggonette and talked to his ancient foe, Miss Mullen, with a novel friendliness, he gnawed the ends of his moustache in the bitterness of his soul because of the coldness of the eyes that were fascinating him.

  It was a bright and blowy afternoon, with dazzling masses of white cloud moving fast across the blue, and there was a shifting glimmer of young leaves in the Bruff avenue, and a gusty warmth of fragrance from lilacs and laurel blossoms on either side. As this strangely compounded party of visitors drove up to the hall door they caught sight of Christopher going down the lawn towards the boat-house, and in answer to a call from Mr. Hawkins, he turned and came back to meet them. He was only on his way to the boat-house to meet Cursiter, he explained, and he was the only person at home, but he hoped that they would, none the less, come in and see him. Hawkins helped Francie out of the carriage, giving her a hand no less formal than that which she gave him. She recognised the formality, and was not displeased to think that it was assumed in obedience to her wish.

  They all strolled slowly on towards the boat-house, Hawkins walking behind with Miss Mullen, Francie in front with her host. It was not her first meeting with him since her return to Lismoyle, and she found it quite easy to talk with him of her travels, and of those small things that make up the sum of ordinary afternoon conversation. She had come to believe now that she must have been mistaken on that afternoon when he had stood over her in the Tally Ho drawing-room and said those unexpected things to her—things that, at the time, seemed neither ambiguous nor Platonic. He was now telling her, in the quietly hesitating voice that had always seemed to her the very height of good breeding, that the weather was perfect, and that the lake was lower than he had ever known it at that time of year, with other like commonplaces, and though there was something wanting in his manner that she had been accustomed to, she discerned none of the awkwardness that her experience had made her find inseparable from the rejected state.

  There was no sign of Captain Cursiter or his launch when they reached the pier, and, after a fruitless five minutes of waiting, they went on, at Christopher’s suggestion, to see the bluebells in the wood that girdled the little bay of Bruff. Before they reached the gate of the wood, Miss Mullen had attached herself to Christopher, having remarked, with engaging frankness, that Mr. Hawkins could only talk to her about Lismoyle, and she wanted Sir Christopher to tell her of the doings of the great world; and Francie found herself following them with Hawkins by her side. The park turned inwards and upwards from the lake, climbing, by means of a narrow flight of mossgrown stone steps, till it gained the height of about fifty feet above the water. Walking there, the glitter of the lake came up brokenly to the eye through the beech-tree branches, that lay like sprays of maiden-hair beneath them; and over the hill and down to the water’s edge and far away among the grey beech stems, the bluebells ran like a blue mist through all the wood. Their perfume rose like incense about Francie and her companion as they walked slowly, and ever more slowly, along the path. The spirit of the wood stole into their veins, and a pleasure that they could not have explained held them in silence that they were afraid to break.

  Hawkins was the first to make a diffident comment.

  “They’re ripping, aren’t they? They’re a great deal better than they were last year.”

  “I didn’t see them last year.”

  “No, I know you didn’t,” he said quickly; “you didn’t come to Lismoyle till the second week in June.”

  “You seem to remember more about it than I do,” said Francie, still maintaining her attitude of superiority.

  “I don’t think I’m likely to forget it,” he said, turning and looking at her.

  She looked down at the ground with a heightening colour and a curl of the lip that did not come easily. If she found it hard to nurse her anger against Charlotte, it was thrice more difficult to harden herself to the voice to which one vibrating string in her heart answered in spite of her.

  “Oh, there’s nothing people can’t forget if they try!” she said, with a laugh. “I always find it much harder to remember!”

  “But people sometimes succeed in doing things they don’t like,” said Hawkins pertinaciously.

  “Not if they don’t want to,” replied Francie, holding her own, with something of her habitual readiness.

  Hawkins’ powers of repartee weakened a little before this retort. “No, I suppose not,” he said, trying to make up by bitterness of tone for want of argument.

  Francie was silent, triumphantly silent, it seemed to him, as he walked beside her and switched off the drooping heads of the bluebells with his stick. He had experiences that might have taught him that this appetite for combat, this det
ermination to trample on him, was a more measurable thing than the contempt that will not draw a sword; but he was able to think of nothing except that she was unkind to him, and that she was prettier now than he had ever seen her. He was so thoroughly put out that he was not aware of any awkwardness in the silence that had progressed, unbroken, for a minute or two. It was Francie to whom it was apparently most trying, as, at length, with an obvious effort at small talk, she said:

  “I suppose that’s Captain Cursiter coming up the lake,” indicating, through an opening in the branches, a glimpse of a white funnel and its thong of thinly streaming vapour; “he seems as fond of boating as ever.”

  “Yes, I daresay he is,” said Hawkins, without pretending any interest, real or polite, in the topic. He was in the frame of mind that lies near extravagance of some kind, whether of temper or sentiment, and, being of a disposition not versed in self-repression, he did not attempt diplomacy. He looked sulkily at the launch, and then, with a shock of association, he thought of the afternoon that he and Francie had spent on the lake, and the touch of unworthiness that there was in him made him long to remind her of her subjugation.

  “Are you as fond of boating as—as you were when we ran aground last year?” he said, and looked at her daringly.

  He was rewarded by seeing her start perceptibly and turn her head away, and he had the grace to feel a little ashamed of himself. Francie looked down the bluebell slope till her eyes almost ached with the soft glow of colour, conscious that every moment of delay in answering told against her, but unable to find the answer. The freedom and impertinence of the question did not strike her at all; she only felt that he was heartlessly trying to humiliate her.

  “I’d be obliged to you, Mr. Hawkins,” she said, her panting breath making her speak with extreme difficulty, “if you’d leave me to walk by myself.”

  Before she spoke he knew that he had made a tremendous mistake, and, as she moved on at a quickened pace, he felt he must make peace with her at any price.