The Real Charlotte

by Edith Somerville

  “Miss Mullen and Mrs. Lambert gave him a lift,” said Christopher, uncommunicatively; “I believe they overtook him on his way here.”

  Lady Dysart meditated, with her dark eyebrows drawn into a frown.

  “I think that girl will make a very great mistake if she begins a flirtation with Mr. Hawkins again,” she said presently; “there has been quite enough talk about her already in connection with her marriage.” Lady Dysart untied her bonnet strings as if with a need of more air, and flung them back over each shoulder. In the general contrariety of things, it was satisfactory to find an object so undeniably deserving of reprobation as the new Mrs. Lambert. “I call her a thorough adventuress!” she continued. “She came down here, determined to marry some one, and as Mr. Hawkins escaped from her, she just snatched at the next man she could find!”

  Pamela came over and sat down on the arm of her mother’s chair. “Now, mamma,” she said, putting her arm round Lady Dysart’s crape-clad shoulder, “you can’t deny that she knew all about the Dublin clergy and went to Sunday-school regularly for ten years and she guessed two lights of an acrostic for you.”

  “Yes, two that happened to be slangy! No, my dear child, I admit that she is very pretty, but, as I said before, she has proved herself to be nothing but an adventuress. Everyone in the country has said the same thing!”

  “I can scarcely imagine anyone less like an adventuress,” said Christopher, with the determined quietness by which he sometimes mastered his stammer.

  His mother looked at him with the most unaffected surprise. “And I can scarcely imagine anyone who knows less about the matter than you!” she retorted. “Oh, my dear boy, don’t smoke another of those horrid things,” as Christopher got up abruptly and began to fumble rather aimlessly in a cigarette-box on the chimney-piece, “I’m sure you’ve smoked more than is good for you. You look quite white already.”

  He made no reply, and his mother’s thoughts reverted to the subject under discussion. Suddenly a little cloud of memory began to appear on her mental horizon. Now that she came to think of it, had not Kate Gascogne once mentioned Christopher’s name to her in preposterous connection with that of the present Mrs. Lambert?

  “Let me tell you!” she exclaimed, her deep-set eyes glowing with the triumphant effort of memory “that people said she did her very utmost to capture you! and I can very well believe it of her; a grievous waste of ammunition on her part, wasn’t it, Pamela? Though it did not result in an engagement!” she added, highly pleased at being able to press a pun into her argument.

  “Oh, I think she spared Christopher,” struck in Pamela with a conciliatory laugh; “‘Poor is the conquest of the timid hare,’ you know!” She was aware of something portentously rigid in her brother’s attitude, and would have given much to have changed the conversation, but the situation was beyond her control.

  “I don’t think she would have thought it such a poor conquest,” said Lady Dysart indignantly; “a girl like that, accustomed to attorneys’ clerks and commercial travellers—she’d have done anything short of suicide for such a chance!”

  Christopher had stood silent during this discussion. He was losing his temper, but he was doing it after his fashion, slowly and almost imperceptibly. The pity for Mr. Lambert’s wife, that had been a primary result of Charlotte’s indictment, flamed up into quixotism, and every word his mother said was making him more hotly faithful to the time when his conquest had been complete.

  “I daresay it will surprise you to hear that I gave her the chance, and she didn’t take it,” he said suddenly.

  Lady Dysart grasped the arms of her chair, and then fell back into it.

  “You did!”

  “Yes, I did,” replied Christopher, beginning to walk towards the door. He knew he had done a thing that was not only superfluous, but savoured repulsively of the pseudo-heroic, and the attitude in which he had placed himself was torture to his reserve. “This great honour was offered to her,” he went on, taking refuge in lame satire, “last August, unstimulated by any attempts at suicide on her part, and she refused it. I—I think it would be kinder if you put her down as a harmless lunatic, than as an adventuress, as far as I am concerned.” He shut the door behind him as he finished speaking, and Lady Dysart was left staring at her daughter, complexity of emotions making speech an idle thing.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XLVIII.

  The question, ten days afterwards, to anyone who had known all the features of the case, would have been whether Francie was worth Christopher’s act of championing.

  At the back of the Rosemount kitchen-garden the ground rose steeply into a knoll of respectable height, where grew a tangle of lilac bushes, rhododendrons, seringas, and yellow broom. A gravel path wound ingratiatingly up through these, in curves artfully devised by Mr. Lambert to make the most of the extent and the least of the hill, and near the top a gardenseat was sunk in the bank, with laurels shutting it in on each side, and a laburnum “showering golden tears” above it. Through the perfumed screen of the lilac bushes in front unromantic glimpses of the roof of the house were obtainable—eyesores to Mr. Lambert, who had concentrated all his energies on hiding everything nearer than the semi-circle of lake and distant mountain held in an opening cut through the rhododendrons at the corner of the little plateau on which the seat stood. Without the disturbance of middle distance the eye lay at ease on the far-off struggle of the Connemara mountains, and on a serene vista of Loughmoyle; a view that enticed forth, as to a playground, the wildest and most foolish imaginations, and gave them elbow-room; a world so large and remote that it needed the sound of wheels on the road to recall the existence of the petty humanities of Lismoyle.

  Francie and Hawkins were sitting there on the afternoon of the day on which Lambert was expected to come home, and as the sun, that had stared in at them through the opening in the rhododendrons when they first went there, slid farther round, their voices sank in unconscious accord with the fading splendours of the afternoon, and their silences seemed momently more difficult to break. They were nearing the end of the phase that had begun in the wood at Bruff, impelled to its verge by the unspoken knowledge that the last of the unthinking, dangerous days were dying with the sun, and that a final parting was looming up beyond. Neither knew for certain the mind of the other, or how they had dropped into this so-called friendship that in half a dozen afternoons had robbed all other things of reality, and made the intervals between their meetings like a feverish dream. Francie did not dare to think much about it; she lived in a lime-light glow that surrounded her wherever she went, and all the world outside was dark. He was going in a fortnight, in ten days, in a week; that was the only fact that the future had held for her since Captain Cursiter had met them with the telegram in his hand on the lake shore at Bruff. She forgot her resolutions; she forgot her pride; and before she reached home that afternoon the spell of the new phase, that was the old, only intensified by forgiveness, was on her. She shut her eyes, and blindly gave house-room in her heart to the subtle passion that came in the garb of an old friend, with a cant about compassion on its lips, and perfidious promises that its life was only for a fortnight.

  To connect this supreme crisis of a life with such a person as Mr. Gerald Hawkins may seem incongruous; but Francie was not aware of either crisis or incongruity. All she knew of was the enthralment that lay in each prosaic afternoon visit, all she felt, the tired effort of conscience against fascination. Her emotional Irish nature, with all its frivolity and recklessness, had also, far down in it, an Irish girl’s moral principle and purity; but each day she found it more difficult to hide the truth from him; each day the under-currents of feeling drew them helplessly nearer to each other. Everything was against her. Lambert’s business had, as he expected, taken him to Dublin, and kept him there; Cursiter, like most men, was chary of active interference in another man’s affairs, whatever his private opinion might be; and Charlotte, that guardian of youth, that trusty and vigilant spy, sat i
n her own room writing interminable letters, or went on long and complicated shopping expeditions whenever Hawkins came to the house.

  On this golden, still afternoon, Francie strayed out soon after lunch into the garden, half dazed with unhappiness and excitement. To-night her husband would come home. In four days Hawkins would have gone, as eternally, so far as she was concerned, as if he were dead; he would soon forget her, she thought, as she walked to and fro among the blossoming apple trees in the kitchen-garden. Men forgot very easily, and, thanks to the way she had tried her best to make him think she didn’t care, there was not a word of hers to bring him back to her. She hated herself for her discretion; her soul thirsted for even one word of understanding, that would be something to live upon in future days of abnegation, when it would be nothing to her that she had gained his respect, and one tender memory would be worth a dozen self-congratulations.

  She turned at the end of the walk and came back again under the apple trees; the ground under her feet was white with fallen blossoms; her fair hair gleamed among the thick embroidery of the branches, and her face was not shamed by their translucent pink and white. At a little distance Eliza Hackett, in a starched lilac calico, was gathering spinach, and mediating no doubt with comfortable assurance on the legitimacy of Father Heffernan’s apostolic succession, but outwardly the embodiment of solid house-hold routine and respectability. As Francie passed her she raised her decorous face from the spinach-bed with a question as to whether the trout would be for dinner or for breakfast; the master always fancied fish for his breakfast, she reminded Francie. Eliza Hackett’s tone was distant, but admonitory, and it dispelled in a moment the visions of another now impossible future that were holding high carnival before Francie’s vexed eyes. The fetter made itself coldly felt, and following came the quick pang of remorse at the thought of the man who was wasting on her the best love he had to give. Her change of mood was headlong, but its only possible expression was trivial to absurdity, if indeed any incident in a soul’s struggle can be called trivial. Some day, further on in eternity, human beings will know what their standards of proportion and comparison are worth, and may perhaps find the glory of some trifling actions almost insufferable.

  She gave the necessary order, and hurrying into the house brought out from it the piece of corduroy that she was stitching in lines of red silk as a waistcoat for her husband, and with a childish excitement at the thought of this expiation, took the path the led to the shrubbery on the hill. As she reached its first turn she hesitated and stopped, an idea of further and fuller renunciation occurring to her. Turning, she called to the figure stooping among the glossy rows of spinach to desire that the parlour-maid should say that this afternoon she was not at home. Had Eliza Hackett then and there obeyed the order, it is possible that many things would have happened differently. But fate is seldom without a second string to her bow, and even if Francie’s message had not been delayed by Eliza Hackett’s determination to gather a pint of green gooseberries before she went in, it is possible that Hawkins would, none the less have found his way to the top of the shrubbery, where Francie was sewing with the assiduity of Penelope. It was about four o’clock when she heard his steps coming up the devious slants of the path, and she knew as she heard it that, in spite of all her precautions, she had expected him. His manner and even his look had nothing now in them of the confident lover of last year; his flippancy was gone, and when he began by reproaching her for having hidden from him, his face was angry and wretched, and he spoke like a person who has been seriously and unjustly hurt. He was more in love than he had ever been before, and he was taking it badly, like a fever that the chills of opposition were driving back into his system.

  She made excuses as best she might, with her eyes bent upon her work.

  “I might have been sitting in the drawing-room now,” he said petulantly; “only that Miss Mullen had seen you going off here by yourself, and told me I’d better go and find you.”

  An unreasoning fear came over Francie, a fear as of something uncanny.

  “Let us go back to the house,” she said; “Charlotte will be expecting us.” She said it to contradict the thought that had become definite for the first time. “Come; I’m going in.”

  Hawkins did not move. “I suppose you forget that this is Wednesday, and that I’m going on Saturday,” he replied dully. “In any case you’ll not be much good to Charlotte. She’s gone up to pack her things. She told me herself she was going to be very busy, as she had to start at six o’clock.”

  Francie leaned back, and realised that now she had no one to look to but herself, and happiness and misery fought within her till her hands trembled as she worked.

  Each knew that this was, to all intents and purposes, their last meeting, and their consciousness was charged to brimming with unexpressed farewell. She talked of indifferent subjects; of what Aldershot would be like, of what Lismoyle would think of the new regiment, of the trouble that he would have in packing his pictures, parrying, with a weakening hand, his efforts to make every subject personal; and all the time the laburnum drooped in beautiful despair above her, as if listening and grieving, and the cool-leaved lilac sent its fragrance to mingle with her pain, and to stir her to rebellion with the ecstasy of spring-time. The minutes passed barrenly by, and, as has been said, the silences became longer and more clinging, and the thoughts that filled them made each successive subject more bare and artificial. At last Hawkins got up, and walking to the opening cut in the shrubs, stood, with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the lake and the mountains. Francie stitched on; it seemed to her that if she stopped she would lose her last hold upon herself; she felt as if her work were a talisman to remind her of all the things that she was in peril of forgetting. When, that night, she took up the waistcoat again to work at it, she thought that her heart’s blood had gone into the red stitches.

  It was several minutes before Hawkins spoke. “Francie,” he said, turning round and speaking thickly, “are you going to let me leave you in this— in this kind of way? Have you realised that when I go on Saturday it’s most likely—it’s pretty certain, in fact—that we shall never see each other again?”

  “Yes, I have,” she said, after a pause of a second or two. She did not say that for a fortnight her soul had beaten itself against the thought, and that to hear it in words was as much as her self-command could bear.

  “You seem to care a great deal!” he said violently; “you’re thinking of nothing but that infernal piece of work, that I loathe the very sight of. Don’t you think you could do without it for five minutes, at all events?”

  She let her hands drop into her lap, but made no other reply.

  “You’re not a bit like what you used to be. You seem to take a delight in snubbing me and shutting me up. I must say, I never thought you’d have turned into a prig!” He felt this reproach to be so biting that he paused upon it to give it its full effect. “Here I am going to England in fout days, and to India in four months, and it’s ten to one if I ever come home again. I mean to volunteer for the very first row that turns up. But it’s just the same to you, you won’t even take the trouble to say you’re sorry.”

  “If you had taken the trouble to answer my letters last autumn, you wouldn’t be saying these things to me now,” she said, speaking low and hurriedly.

  “I don’t believe it! I believe if you had cared about me then you wouldn’t treat me like this now.”

  “I did care for you,” she said, while the hard-held tears forced their way to her eyes; “you made me do it, and then you threw me over, and now you’re trying to put the blame on me!”

  He saw the glisten on her eyelashes, and it almost took from him the understanding of what she said.

  “Francie,” he said, his voice shaking, and his usually confident eyes owning the infection of her tears, “you might forget that. I’m miserable. I can’t bear to leave you!” He sat down again beside her, and, catching her hand, kissed it with a passion o
f repentance. He felt it shrink from his lips, but the touch of it had intoxicated him, and suddenly she was in his arms.

  For a speechless instant they clung to each other; her head dropped to his shoulder, as if the sharp release from the tension of the last fortnight had killed her, and the familiar voice murmured in her ear:

  “Say it to me—say you love me.”

  “Yes I do—my dearest—” she said, with a moan that was tragically at variance with the confession. “Ah, why do you make me so wicked!” She snatched herself away from him, and stood up, trembling all over. “I wish I had never seen you— I wish I was dead.”

  “I don’t care what you say now,” said Hawkins, springing to his feet, “you’ve said you loved me, and I know you meant it. Will you stand by it?” he went on wildly. “If you’ll only say the word I’ll chuck everything overboard—I can’t go away from you like this. Once I’m in England I can’t get back here, and if I did, what good would it be to me? He’d never give us a chance of seeing each other, and we’d both be more miserable than we are, unless— unless there was a chance of meeting you in Dublin or somewhere—?” He stopped for an instant. Francie mutely shook her head. “Well, then, I shall never see you.”

  There was silence, and the words settled down into both their hearts. He cursed himself for being afraid of her, she, whom he had always felt to be his inferior, yet when he spoke it was with an effort.

  “Come away with me out of this—come away with me for good and all! What’s the odds? We can’t be more than happy!”

  Francie made an instinctive gesture with her hand while he spoke, as if to stop him, but she said nothing, and almost immediately the distant rush and rattle of a train came quietly into the stillness.