The Real Charlotte Part 2

He turned from the window at last, and coming back into the lamplit room, surveyed it and its unconscious occupants with a feeling of intolerance for their unlovely slumber. His next step was the almost unprecedented one of changing his slippers for boots, and in a few minutes he had left the house.

CHAPTER VI.

Norry the Boat toiled up the back stairs with wrath in her heart. She had been listening for some minutes with grim enjoyment to cries from the landing upstairs; unavailing calls for Louisa, interspersed with the dumb galvanic quiver of a bell-less bellwire, and at last Francie's voice at the angle half-way down the kitchen stairs had entreated her to find and despatch to her the missing Protestant orphan. Then Norry had said to herself, while she lifted the pot of potatoes off the fire, "Throuble-the-house! G.o.d knows I'm heart-scalded with the whole o' yees!" And then aloud, "She's afther goin' out to the dhryin' ground to throw out a few aper'rns to blaych."

"Well, I must have somebody; I can't get my habit on," the voice had wailed in reply. "Couldn't you come, Norry?"

As we have said, Norry ascended the stairs with wrath in her heart, as gruesome a lady's-maid as could well be imagined, with an ap.r.o.n mottled with grease spots, and a stale smell of raw onions pervading her generally. Francie was standing in front of the dim looking-gla.s.s with which Charlotte chastened the vanity of her guests, trying with stiff and tired fingers to drag the b.u.t.tons of a brand new habit through the unyielding b.u.t.tonholes that tailors alone have the gift of making, and Norry's anger was forgotten in prayerful horror, as her eyes wandered from the hard felt hat to the trousered ankle that appeared beneath the skimpy and angular skirt.

"The Lord look down in pity on thim that cut that petticoat!" she said. "Sure, it's not out in the sthreets ye're goin' in the like o' that! G.o.d knows it'd be as good for ye to be dhressed like a man altogether!"

"I wouldn't care what I was dressed like if I could only make the beastly thing meet," said Francie, her face flushed with heat and effort; "wasn't I the fool to tell him to make it tight in the waist!"

The subsequent proceedings were strenuous, but in the end successful, and finally Miss Fitzpatrick walked stiffly downstairs, looking very slender and tall, with the tail of the dark green habit-she had felt green to be the colour consecrated to sport- drawn tightly round her, and a silver horse-shoe brooch at her throat.

Charlotte was standing at the open hall door talking to Mr. Lambert.

"Come along, child," she said genially, "you've been so long adorning yourself that nothing but his natural respect for the presence of a lady kept this gentleman from indulging in abusive language."

Charlotte, in her lighter moods, was addicted to a ponderous persiflage, the aristocratic foster-sister of her broader peasant jestings in the manner of those whom she was fond of describing as "the bar purple."

Mr. Lambert did not trouble himself to reply to this sally. He was looking at the figure in the olive-green habit, that was advancing along the path of sunlight to the doorway, and thinking that he had done well to write that letter on the subject of the riding that Francie might expect to have at Lismoyle. Charlotte turned her head also to look at the radiant, sunlit figure.

"Why, child, were you calling Norry just now to melt you down and pour you into that garment? I never saw such a waist! Take care and don't let her fall off, Roddy, or she'll snap in two!" She laughed loudly and discordantly, looking to Mr. Lambert's groom for the appreciation that was lacking in the face of his master; and during the arduous process of getting Miss Fitzpatrick into her saddle she remained on the steps, offering facetious suggestions and warnings, with her short arms akimbo, and a smile that was meant to be jovial accentuating the hard lines of her face.

At last the green habit was adjusted, the reins placed properly between Francie's awkward fingers, and Mr. Lambert had mounted his long-legged young chestnut and was ready to start.

"Don't forget Lucy expects you to tea, Charlotte," he said as he settled himself in his saddle.

"And don't you forget what I told you," replied Charlotte, sinking her voice confidentially; "don't mind her if she opens her mouth wide, it'll take less to shut it than ye'd think."

Lambert nodded and rode after Francie, who, in compliance with the wishes of the black mare, had hurried on towards the gate. The black mare was a lady of character, well-mannered but firm, and the mere sit of the saddle on her back told her that this was a case when it would be well to take matters into her own control; she accordingly dragged as much of the reins as she required from Francie's helpless hands, and by the time she had got on to the high road had given her rider to understand that her position was that of tenant at will.

They turned their backs on the town, and rode along the dazzling, dusty road, that radiated all the heat of a blazing afternoon.

"I think he did you pretty well with that habit," remarked Lambert presently. "What's the damage to be?"

"What do you think?" replied Francie gaily, answering one question with another after the manner of her country.

"Ten?"

"Ah, go on! Where'd I get ten pounds? He said he'd only charge me six because you recommended me, but I can tell him he'll have to wait for his money."

"Why, are you hard up again?"

Francie looked up at him and laughed with unconcern that was not in the least affected.

"Of course I am! Did you ever know me that I wasn't?"

Lambert was silent for a moment or two, and half unconsciously his thoughts ran back over the time, six years ago now, when he had first met Francie. There had always been something exasperating to him in her brilliant indifference to the serious things of life. Her high spirits were as impenetrable as a coat of mail; her ignorance of the world was at once sublime and enraging. She had not seemed in the least impressed by the fact that he, whom up to this time she had known as merely a visitor at her uncle's house, a feature of the Lawn-Tennis tournament week, and a person with whom to promenade Merrion Square while the band was playing, was, in reality, a country gentleman, a J. P., and a man of standing, who owned as good horses as anyone in the country. She even seemed as impervious as ever to the pathos of his position in having thrown himself and his good looks away upon a plain woman six or seven years older than himself. All these things pa.s.sed quickly through his mind, as if they found an accustomed groove there, and mingled acidly with the disturbing sub-consciousness that the mare would inevitably come home with a sore back if her rider did not sit straighter than she was doing at present.

"Look here, Francie," he said at last, with something of asperity, "it's all very fine to humbug now, but if you don't take care you'll find yourself in the county court some fine day. It's easier to get there than you'd think," he added gloomily, "and then there'll be the devil to pay, and nothing to pay him with; and what'll you do then?"

"I'll send for you to come and bail me out!" replied Francie without hesitation, giving an unconsidered whack behind the saddle as she spoke. The black mare at once showed her sense of the liberty by kicking up her heels in a manner that lifted Francie a hand's-breadth from her seat, and shook her foot out of the stirrup. "Gracious!" she gasped, when she had sufficiently recovered herself to speak; "what did he do? Did he buck-jump? Oh, Mr. Lambert-" as the mare, satisfied with her protest, broke into a sharp trot, "do stop him, I can't get my foot into the stirrup!"

Lambert, trotting serenely beside her on his tall chestnut, watched her precarious b.u.mpings for a minute or two with a grin, then he stretched out a capable hand, and pulled the mare into a walk.

"Now, where would you be without me?" he inquired.

"Sitting on the road," replied Francie. "I never felt such a horrid rough thing-and look at Mrs. Lambert looking at me over the wall! Weren't you a cad that you wouldn't stop him before."

In the matter of exercise, Mrs. Lambert was one of those people who want but little here below, nor want that little long. The tour of the two acres that formed the demesne of Rosemount was generally her limit, and any spare energy that remained to her after that perambulation was spent in taking weeds out of the garden path with a lady-like cane-handled spud. This implement was now in her gauntletted hand, and she waved it feebly to the riders as they pa.s.sed, while m.u.f.fy stood in front of her and barked with asthmatic fury.

"Make Miss Fitzpatrick come in to tea on her way home, Roderick" she called, looking admiringly at the girl with kind eyes that held no spark of jealousy of her beauty and youth. Mrs. Lambert was one of the women who sink prematurely and unresistingly into the sloughs of middle-age. For her there had been no intermediary period of anxious tracking of grey hairs, of fevered energy in the playing of lawn-tennis and rounders; she had seen, with a feeling too sluggish to be respected as resignation, her complexion ascend the scale of colour from pa.s.sable pink to the full sunset flush that now burned in her cheeks and spanned the sharp ridge of her nose; and she still, as she had always done, bought her expensive Sunday bonnet as she would have bought a piece of furniture, because it was handsome, not because it was becoming. The garden hat which she now wore could not pretend to either of these qualifications, and, as Francie looked at her, the contrast between her and her husband was as conspicuous as even he could have wished.

Francie's first remark, however, after they had pa.s.sed by, seemed to show that her point of view was not the same as his.

"Won't she be very lonely there all the afternoon by herself?" she asked, with a backward glance at the figure in the garden hat.

"Oh, not she!" said Lambert carelessly, "she has the dog, and she'll potter about there as happy as possible. She's all right." Then after a pause, in which the drift of Francie's question probably presented itself to him for the first time, "I wish everyone was as satisfied with their life as she is"

"How bad you are!" returned Francie, quite unmoved by the gloomily sentimental roll of Mr. Lambert's eyes. "I never heard a man talk such nonsense in my life!"

"My dear child," said Lambert, with paternal melancholy, "when you're my age-"

"Which I sha'n't be for the next fifteen years-" interrupted Francie.

Mr. Lambert checked himself abruptly, and looked cross.

"Oh, all right! If you're going to sit on me every time I open my mouth, I'd better shut up."

Francie with some difficulty brought the black mare beside the chestnut, and put her hand for an instant on Lambert's arm.

"Ah now, don't be angry with me!" she said, with a glance whose efficacy she had often proved in similar cases, "you know I was only funning."

"I am not in the least angry with you," replied Lambert coldly, though his eyes turned in spite of himself to her face.

"Oh, I know very well you're angry with me," rejoined Francie, with unfeigned enjoyment of the situation; "your mustash always gets as black as a coal when you're angry."

The adornment referred to twitched, but its owner said nothing.

"There now, you're laughing!" continued Francie, "but it's quite true; I remember the first time I noticed, that was the time you brought Mrs. Lambert up to town about her teeth, and you took places at the Gaiety for the three of us-and oh! do you remember-" leaning back and laughing whole-heartedly, "she couldn't get her teeth in in time, and you wanted her to go without any, and she wouldn't, for fear she might laugh at the pantomime, and I had promised to go to the Dalkey Band that night with the Whittys, and then when you got up to our house and found you'd got the three tickets for nothing, you were so mad that when I came down into the parlour I declare I thought you'd been dyeing your mustash! Aunt Tish said afterwards it was because your face got so white, but I knew it was because you were in such a pa.s.sion."

"Well, I didn't like chucking away fifteen shillings a bit more than anyone else would," said Lambert.

"Ah, well, we made it up, d'ye remember," said Francie, regarding him with a laughing eye, in which there was a suspicion of sentiment; "and after all you were able to change the tickets to another night, and it was 'Pinafore,' and you laughed at me so awfully, because I cried at the part where the two lovers are saying good-bye to each other, and poor Mrs. Lambert got her teeth in in a hurry to go with us, and she couldn't utter the whole night for fear they'd fall out."

Perhaps the allusions to his wife's false teeth had a subtly soothing effect on Mr. Lambert. He never was averse to anything that showed that other people were as conscious as he was of the disparity between his own admirable personal equipment and that of Mrs. Lambert; it was another admission of the great fact that he had thrown himself away. His eyebrows and moustache became less truculent, he let himself down with a complacent sarcasm on Francie's method of holding her whip, and, as they rode on, he permitted to himself the semi-proprietary enjoyment of an agent in pointing out boundaries, and landmarks, and improvements.

They had ridden at first under a pale green arch of road-side trees, with fields on either side full of b.u.t.tercups and dog-daisies, a land of pasture and sleek cattle, and neat stone walls. But in the second or third mile the face of the country changed. The blue lake that had lain in the distance like a long slab of lapis lazuli, was within two fields of them now, moving drowsily in and out of the rocks, and over the coa.r.s.e gravel of its sh.o.r.e. The trees had dwindled to ragged hazel and thorn bushes; the fat cows of the comfortable farms round Lismoyle were replaced by lean, dishevelled goats, and shelves and flags of gray limestone began to contest the right of the soil with the thin gra.s.s and the wiry brushwood. We have said gray limestone, but that hard-worked adjective cannot at all express the cold, pure blueness that these boulders take, under the sky of summer. Some word must yet be coined in which neither blue nor lilac shall have the supremacy, and in which the steely purple of a pigeon's breast shall not be forgotten.

The rock was everywhere. Even the hazels were at last squeezed out of existence, and inland, over the slowly swelling hills, it lay like the pavement of some giant city, that had been jarred from its symmetry by an earthquake. A mile away on the further side of this iron belt, a clump of trees rose conspicuously by the lake side, round a two-storied white house, and towards these trees the road wound its sinuous way. The gra.s.s began to show in larger and larger patches between the rocks, and the indomitable hazels crept again out of the crannies, and raised their low canopies over the heads of the browsing sheep and goats. A stream, brown with turf-mould, and fierce with battles with the boulders, made a boundary between the stony wilderness and the dark green pastures of Gurthnamuckla. It dashed under a high-backed little bridge with such excitement that the black mare, for all her intelligence, curved her neck, and sidled away from the parapet towards Lambert's horse.

Just beyond the bridge, a repulsive looking old man was sitting on a heap of stones, turning over the contents of a dirty linen pouch. Beside him were an empty milk-can, and a black and white dog which had begun by trying to be a collie, and had relapsed into an indifferent attempt at a grey-hound. It greeted the riders with the usual volley of barking, and its owner let fall some of the coppers that he was counting over, in his haste to strike at it with the long stick that was lying beside him.

"Have done! Sailor! Blasht yer sowl! Have done!" then, with honeyed obsequiousness, "yer honour's welcome, Mr. Lambert."

"Is Miss Duffy in the house?" asked Lambert.

"She is, she is, yer honour," he answered, in the nasal mumble peculiar to his cla.s.s, getting up and beginning to shuffle after the horses, "but what young lady is this at all? Isn't she very grand, G.o.d bless her!"

"She's Miss Fitzpatrick, Miss Mullen's cousin, Billy," answered Lambert graciously; approbation could not come from a source too low for him to be susceptible to it.

The old man came up beside Francie, and, clutching the skirt of her habit, blinked at her with sly and swimming eyes.

"Fitzpathrick is it? Begob I knew her grannema well; she was a fine hearty woman, the Lord have mercy on her! And she never seen me without she'd give me a shixpence or maybe a shillin'."

Francie was skilled in the repulse of the Dublin beggar, but this ancestral precedent was something for which she was not prepared. The clutch tightened on her habit and the disgusting old face almost touched it, as Billy pressed close to her, mouthing out incomprehensible blessings and entreaties. She felt afraid of his red eyes and clawing fingers, and she turned helplessly to Lambert.

"Here, be off now, Billy, you old fool!" he said; "we've had enough of you. Run and open the gate."

The farm-house, with its clump of trees, was close to them, and its drooping iron entrance gate shrieked resentfully as the old man dragged it open.

CHAPTER VII.

Miss Julia Duffy, the tenant of Gurthnamuckla, was a woman of few friends. The cart track that led to her house was covered with gra.s.s, except for two brown ruts and a narrow footpath in the centre, and the boughs of the sycamores that grew on either side of it drooped low as if ignoring the possibility of a visitor. The house door remained shut from year's end to year's end, contrary to the usual kindly Irish custom; in fact, its rotten timbers were at once supported and barricaded by a diagonal beam that held them together, and was itself beginning to rot under its shroud of cobwebs. The footpath skirted the duckpond in front of the door, and led round the corner of the house to what had been in the palmy days of Gurthnamuckla the stableyard, and would through its weedy heaps of dirt to the kitchen door.

Julia Duffy, looking back through the squalors of some sixty years, could remember the days when the hall door used to stand open from morning till night, and her father's guests were many and thirsty, almost as thirsty as he, though perhaps less persistently so. He had been a hard-drinking Protestant farmer, who had married his own dairywoman, a Roman Catholic, dirty, thriftless, and a cousin of Norry the Boat; and he had so disintegrated himself with whisky that his body and soul fell asunder at what was considered by his friends to be the premature age of seventy-two. Julia had always been wont to go to Lismoyle church with her father, not so much as a matter of religious as of social conviction. All the best bonnets in the town went to the parish church, and to a woman of Julia's stamp, whose poor relations wear hoods and shawls over their heads and go to chapel, there is no salvation out of a bonnet. After old John Duffy's death, however, bonnets and the aristocratic way of salvation seemed together to rise out of his daughter's scope. Chapel she despised with all the fervour of an Irish Protestant, but if the farm was to be kept and the rent paid, there was no money to spare for bonnets. Therefore Julia, in defiance of the entreaties of her mother's priest and her own parson, would have nothing of either chapel or church, and stayed sombrely at home. Marriage had never come near her; in her father's time the necessary dowry had not been forthcoming, and even her ownership of the farm was not enough to counterbalance her ill-looks and her pagan habits.

As in a higher grade of society science sometimes steps in when religion fails, so, in her moral isolation, Julia Duffy turned her attention to the mysteries of medicine and the culture of herbs. By the time her mother died she had established a position as doctor and wise woman, which was immensely abetted by her independence of the ministrations of any church. She was believed in by the people, but there was no liking in the belief; when they spoke to her they called her Miss Duffy, in deference to a now impalpable difference in rank as well as in recognition of her occult powers, and they kept as clear of her as they conveniently could. The payment of her professional services was a matter entirely in the hands of the people themselves, and ranged, according to the circ.u.mstances of the case, from a score of eggs or a can of b.u.t.termilk, to a crib of turf or "the makings" of a homespun flannel petticoat. Where there was the possibility of a fee it never failed; where there was not, Julia Duffy gave her "yerreb tay" (i.e., herb tea) and Holloway's pills without question or hesitation.

No one except herself knew how vital these offerings were to her. The farm was still hers, and, perhaps, in all her jealous, unsunned nature, the only note of pa.s.sion was her feeling for the twenty acres that, with the house, remained to her of her father's possessions. She had owned the farm for twenty years now, and had been the abhorrence and the despair of each successive Bruff agent. The land went from bad to worse; ignorance, neglect, and poverty are a formidable conjunction even without the moral support that the Land League for a few years had afforded her, and Miss Duffy tranquilly defied Mr. Lambert, offering him at intervals such rent as she thought fitting, while she sub-let her mossy, deteriorated fields to a Lismoyle grazier. Perhaps her nearest approach to pleasure was the time at the beginning of each year when she received and dealt with the offers for the grazing; then she tasted the sweets of ownership, and then she condescended to dole out to Mr. Lambert such payment "on account" as she deemed advisable, confronting his remonstrances with her indisputable poverty, and baffling his threats with the recital of a promise that she should never be disturbed in her father's farm, made to her, she alleged, by Sir Benjamin Dysart, when she entered upon her inheritance.

There had been a time when a barefooted serving-girl had suffered under Miss Duffy's rule; but for the last few years the times had been bad, the price of grazing had fallen, and the mistress's temper and the diet having fallen in a corresponding ratio, the bond-woman had returned to her own people and her father's house, and no successor had been found to take her place. That is to say, no recognised successor. But, as fate would have it, on the very day that "Moireen Rhu" had wrapped her shawl about her head, and stumped, with cursings, out of the house of bondage, the vague stirrings that regulate the perambulations of beggars had caused Billy Grainy to resolve upon Gurthnamuckla as the place where he would, after the manner of his kind, ask for a wallet full of potatoes and a night's shelter. A week afterwards he was still there, drawing water, bringing in turf, feeding the cow, and receiving, in return for these offices, his board and lodging and the daily dressing of a sore shin which had often coerced the most uncharitable to hasty and nauseated almsgiving. The arrangement glided into permanency, and Billy fell into a life of lazy routine that was preserved from stagnation by a daily expedition to Lismoyle to sell milk for Miss Duffy, and to do a little begging on his own account.

Gurthnamuckla had still about it some air of the older days when Julia Duffy's grandfather was all but a gentleman, and her drunken father and dairymaid mother were in their cradles. The tall sycamores that bordered the cart track were witnesses to the time when it had been an avenue, and the lawn-like field was yellow in spring with the daffodils of a former civilisation. The tops of the trees were thick with nests, and the grave cawing of rooks made a background of mellow, serious respectability that had its effect even upon Francie. She said something to this intent as she and Lambert jogged along the gra.s.s by the track.

"Nice!" returned her companion with enthusiasm, I should think it was! I'd make that one of the sweetest little places in the country if I had it. There's no better gra.s.s for young horses anywhere, and there's first-cla.s.s stabling. I can tell you you're not the only one that thinks it's a nice place, he continued, "but this old devil that has it won't give it up; she'd rather let the house rot to pieces over her head than go out of it."

They rode past the barricaded hall door, and round the corner of the house into the yard, and Lambert called for Miss Duffy for some time in vain. Nothing responded except the turkey c.o.c.k, who answered each call with an infuriated gobble, and a donkey, who, in the dark recesses of a cow-house, lifted up his voice in heartrending rejoinder. At last a window fell down with a bang in the upper story, and the mistress of the house put out her head. Francie had only time to catch a glimpse of a thin, dirty face, a hooked nose, and unkempt black hair, before the vision was withdrawn, and a slipshod step was heard coming downstairs.

When Miss Duffy appeared at her kitchen door she had flung a shawl round her head, possibly to conceal the fact that her crinkled mat of hair held thick in it, like powder, the turf ashes of many s.l.u.ttish days. Her stained and torn black skirt had evidently just been unpinned from about her waist, and was. .h.i.tched up at one side, showing a frayed red Galway petticoat, and that her feet had recently been thrust into her boots was attested by the fact that their laces trailed on the ground beside her. In spite of these disadvantages, however, it was with a manner of the utmost patronage that she greeted Mr. Lambert.

"I would ask you and the young leedy to dismount," she continued in the carefully genteel voice that she clung to in the wreck of her fortunes, "but I am, as you will see," she made a gesture with a dingy hand, "quite 'in dishabilly' as they say; I've been a little indisposed, and-"

"Oh, no matter, Miss Duffy," interrupted Lambert, "I only wanted to say a few words to you on business, and Miss Fitzpatrick will ride about the place till we're done."

Miss Duffy's small black eyes turned quickly to Francie.

"Oh, indeed, is that Miss Fitzpatrick? My fawther knew her grandfawther. I am much pleased to make her acquaintance."

She inclined her head as she spoke, and Francie, with much disposition to laugh, bowed hers in return; each instant Miss Duffy's resemblance, both in feature and costume, to a beggar woman who frequented the corner of Sackville Street, was becoming harder to bear with fort.i.tude, and she was delighted to leave Lambert to his tete-a-tete and ride out into the lawn, among the sycamores and hawthorns, where the black mare immediately fell to devouring gra.s.s with a resolve that was quite beyond Francie's power to combat.

She broke a little branch off a low-growing ash tree, to keep away the flies that were doing their best to spoil the pleasure of a perfect afternoon, and sat there, fanning herself lazily, while the mare, with occasional impatient tugs at the reins and stampings at the flies, cropped her way onwards from one luscious tuft to another. The Lismoyle grazier's cattle had collected themselves under the trees at the farther end of the lawn where a swampy pool still remained of the winter encroachments of the lake. In the sunshine at the other side of the wall a chain of such pools stretched to the broad blue water, and grey limestone rocks showed above the tangle of hemlock and tall spikes of magenta foxgloves. A white sail stood dazzlingly out in the turquoise blue of a band of calm, and the mountains on the farther side of the lake were palely clothed in thinnest lavender and most ethereal green.

It might have been the unexpected likeness that she had found in Julia Duffy to her old friend the beggar woman that took Francie's thoughts away from this idyll of perfected summer to the dry, grey Dublin streets that had been her uttermost horizon a week ago. The milkman generally called at the Fitzpatricks' house at about this hour; the clank of his pint measure against the area railings, even his pleasantries with Maggie the cook, relative to his bestowing an extra "sup for the cat," were suddenly and sharply present with her. The younger Fitzpatrick children would be home from school, and would be raging through the kitchen seeking what they might devour in the interval before the six o'clock dinner, and she herself would probably have been engaged in a baking game of tennis in the square outside her uncle's house. She felt very sorry for Aunt Tish when she thought of that hungry gang of sons and daughters and of the evil days that had come upon the excellent and respectable Uncle Robert, and the still more evil days that would come in another fortnight or so, when the whole bursting party had squeezed themselves into a little house at Bray, there to exist for an indefinite period on Irish stew, strong tea, and a diminished income. There was a kind of understanding that when they were "settled" she was to go back to them, and blend once more her five and twenty pounds a year with the Fitzpatrick funds; but this afternoon, with the rich summer stillness and the blaze of b.u.t.tercups all about her, and the unfamiliar feeling of the mare's restless shoulder under her knee, she was exceedingly glad that the settling process would take some months at least. She was not given to introspection, and could not have said anything in the least interesting about her mental or moral atmosphere: she was too uneducated and too practical for any self-communings of this kind; but she was quite certain of two things, that in spite of her affection for the Fitzpatricks she was very glad she was not going to spend the summer in Dublin or Bray, and also, that in spite of certain bewildering aspects of her cousin Charlotte, she was beginning to have what she defined to herself as "a high old time."

It was somewhere about this period in her meditations that she became aware of a slight swishing and puffing sound from the direction of the lake, and a steam-launch came swiftly along close under the sh.o.r.e. She was a smart-looking boat, spick and span as white paint and a white funnel with a bra.s.s band could make her, and in her were seated two men, one, radiant in a red and white blazer, was steering, while the other, in clothes to which even distance failed to lend enchantment, was menially engaged in breaking coals with a hammer. The boughs of the trees intervened exasperatingly between Francie and this glittering vision, and the resolve to see it fully lent her the power to drag the black mare from her repast, and urge her forward to an opening where she could see and be seen, two equally important objects.

She had instantly realised that these were those heroes of romance, "the Lismoyle officers," the probabilities of her alliance with one of whom had been the subject of some elegant farewell badinage on the part of her bosom friend, Miss f.a.n.n.y Hemphill. Francie's acquaintance with the British army had hitherto been limited to one occasion when, at a Sandymount evening band, "one of the officers from Beggars' Bush Barracks"-so she had confided to Miss Hemphill-had taken off his hat to her, and been very polite until Aunt Tish had severely told him that no true gentleman would converse with a lady without she was presented to him, and had incontinently swept her home. She could see them quite plainly now, and from the fact that the man who had been rooting among the coals was now sitting up, evidently at the behest of the steersman, and looking at her, it was clear that she had attracted attention too. Even the black mare p.r.i.c.ked her ears, and stared at this new kind of dragon-fly creature that went noisily by, leaving a feathery smear on the air behind it, and just then Mr. Lambert rode out of the stableyard, and looked about him for his charge.

"Francie!" he called with perceptible impatience; "what are you at down there?"

The steam-launch had by this time pa.s.sed the opening, and Francie turned and rode towards him. Her hat was a good deal on the back of her head, and her brilliant hair caught the sunshine; the charm of her supple figure atoned for the crookedness of her seat, and her eyes shone with an excitement born of the delightful sight of soldiery.

"Oh, Mr. Lambert, weren't those the officers?" she cried, as he rode up to her; "which was which? Haven't they a grand little steamer?"

Lambert's temper had apparently not been improved by his conversation with Julia Duffy; instead of answering Miss Fitzpatrick he looked at her with a clouded brow, and in his heart he said, "d.a.m.n the officers!"

"I wondered which of them was the captain," continued Francie; "I suppose it was the little fair one; he was much the best dressed, and he was making the other one do all the work."

Lambert gave a scornful laugh.

"I'll leave you to find that out for yourself. I'll engage it won't be long before you know all about them. You've made a good start already."

"Oh, very well," replied Francie, letting fall both her reins in order to settle her hat; "some day you'll be asking me something, and I won't tell you, and then you'll be sorry."

"Some day you'll be breaking your neck, and then you'll be sorry," retorted Lambert, taking up the fallen reins.

They rode out to the gate of Gurthnamuckla in silence, and after a mile of trotting, which was to Francie a period of mingled pain and anxiety, the horses slackened of their own accord, and began to pick their way gingerly over the smooth sheets of rock that marked the entry of the road into the stony tract mentioned in the last chapter. Francie took the opportunity for a propitiatory question.

"What were you and the old woman talking about all that time? I thought you were never coming."

"Business," said Lambert shortly; then viciously, "if any conversation with a woman can ever be called business."

"Oho! then you couldn't get her to do what you wanted!" laughed Francie; "very good for you too! I think you always get your own way."