The Real Charlotte Part 20

"Oh, no, not a bit," said Mr. Lambert, who had been secretly surprised and even slightly wounded by the fort.i.tude with which Miss Mullen had borne the intelligence of his second marriage, "but she's complaining that my colts have eaten her best white petticoat."

"You may give her one of my new ones," suggested Francie.

"Oh yes, she'd like that, wouldn't she?" said Lambert with a chuckle; "she's so fond of you, y'know!"

"Oh, she's quite friendly with me now, though I know you're dying to make out that she'll not forgive me for marrying you," said Francie, flinging her last bit of orange-peel at the Apollo; "you're as proud as Punch about it. I believe you'd have married her, only she wouldn't take you!"

"Is that your opinion?" said Mr. Lambert with a smile that conveyed a magnanimous reticence as to the facts of the case; "you're beginning to be jealous, are you? I think I'd better leave you at home the day I go over to talk the old girl into good humour about her petticoat!"

In his heart Mr. Lambert was less comfortable than the tone of his voice might have implied; there had been in the letter, in spite of its friendliness and singular absence of feminine pique, an allusion to that three hundred pounds that circ.u.mstances had forced him to accept from her. His honeymoon, and those new clothes that Francie had bought in London, had run away with no end of money, and it would be infernally inconvenient if Charlotte was going, just at this time of all others, to come down on him for money that he had never asked her for. He turned these things over uncomfortably in his mind as he lay back on the gra.s.s, looking up at Francie's profile, dark against the soft blue of the sky; and even while he took one of her hands and drew it down to his lips he was saying to himself that he had never yet failed to come round Charlotte when he tried, and it would not be for want of trying if he failed now.

The shadows of the trees began to stretch long fingers across the gra.s.s of the Bosquet d'Apollon, and Lambert looked at his watch and began to think of table d'hote at the Louvre Hotel. Pleasant, paradisaically pleasant as it was here in the sun, with Francie's hand in his, and one of his best cigars in his mouth, he had come to the age at which not even Paradise would be enjoyable without a regular dinner hour.

Francie felt chilly and exhausted as they walked back and climbed the innumberable flights of steps that lay between them and the Palace; she privately thought that Versailles would be a horrile place to live in, and not to be compared in any way to Bruff, but, at all events, it would be a great thing to say she had been there, and she could read up all the history part of it in the guide book when she got back to the hotel. They were to go up the Eiffel tower the next day; that would be some fun, anyhow, and to the Hippodrome in the evening, and, though that wouldn't be as good as Hengler's circus, the elephants and horses and things wouldn't be talking French and expecting her to answer them, like the housemaids and shipmen. It was a rest to lean back in the narrow carriage, with the pair of starveling ponies, that rattled along with as much whip-cracking and general pomp as if it were doing ten miles an hour instead of four, and to watch the poplars and villas pa.s.s by in placid succession, delightfully devoid of historical interest.

It was getting dark when they reached Paris, and the breeze had become rough and cold. The lamps were shining among the trees on the Boulevards, and the red and green eyes of the cabs and trams crossed and recrossed each other like a tangle of fire-flies. The electric lights of the Place du Louvre were at length in sight, lofty and pale, like globes of imprisoned daylight above the mundane flare of the gas, and Francie's eyes turned towards them with a languid relief. Her old gift of living every moment of her day seemed gone, and here, in this wonderful Paris, that had so suddenly acquired a real instead of a merely geographical existence for her, the stream of foreign life was pa.s.sing by her, and leaving her face as uniterested and wearied as it ever had been when she looked out of the window at Albatros Villa at the messenger boys and bakers' carts. The street was crowded, and the carriage made slower and slower way through it, till it became finally wedged in the centre of a block. Lambert stood up, and entered upon a one-sided argument with the driver as to how to get out, while Francie remained silent, and indifferent to the situation. A piano-organ at a little distance from them was playing the Boulanger March, with the brilliancy of its tribe, its unfaltering vigour dominating all other sounds. It was a piece of music in which Francie had herself a certain proficiency, and, shutting her eyes with a pang of remembrance, she was back in the Tally Ho drawing-room, strumming it on Charlotte's piano, while Mr. Hawkins, holding the indignant Mrs. Bruff on his lap, forced her unwilling paws to thump a ba.s.s. Now the difficult part, in which she always broke down, was being played; he had petended there that he was her music teacher, and had counted out loud, and rapped her over the knuckles with a tea-spoon, and gone on with all knds of nonsense. The carriage started forward again with a jerk, and Lambert dropped back into his place beside her.

"Of all the a.s.ses unhung these French fellows are the biggest." he said fervently, "and that infernal organ banging away the whole time till I couldn't her my own voice, much less his jabber. Here we are at last, anyhow, and you've got to get out before me."

The tears had sprung overwhelmingly to her eyes, and she could not answer a word. She turned her back on her husband, and stepping our of the carriage she walked unsteadily across the countryard in the white glare of the electric light, leaving the hotel servant, who had offered his arm at the carriage door, to draw what conclusions seemed good to him from the spectacle of her wet checks and trembling lips. She made for the broad flight of steps, and went blindly up them under the drooping fans of the palms, into the reading-room on the first floor. The piano-organ was still audible outside, reiterating to madness the tune that had turn open her past, and she made a hard effort to forget its a.s.sociations and recover herself, catching up an ill.u.s.trated paper to hide her face from the people in the room. It was a minute or two before Lambert followed her.

"Here's a go!" he said, coming towards her with a green envelope in his hand, "here's a wire to say that Sir Benjamin's dead, and they want me back at once."

CHAPTER XLI.

The morning after Lambert received the telegram announcing Sir Benjamin's death, he despatched one to Miss Charlotte Mullen at Gurthnamuckla in which he asked her to notify his immediate return to his household at Rosemount. He had always been in the hahit of relying on her help in small as well as great occasions, and now that he had had that unexpectedly civil letter from her, he had turned to her at once without giving the matter much consideration. It was never safe to trust to a servant's interpretation of the cramped language of a telegram, and moreover, in his self-sufficient belief in his own knowledge of women, he thought that it would flatter her and keep her in good humour if he asked her to give directions to his household. He would have been less confident of his own sagacity had he seen the set of Miss Mullen's jaw as she read the message, and heard the laugh which she permitted to herself as soon as Louisa had left the room.

"It's a pity he didn't hire me to be his major-domo as well as his steward and stud-groom!" she said to herself, "and his financier into the bargain! I declare I don't know what he'd do without me"

The higher and more subtle side of Miss Mullen's nature had exacted of the quivering savage that had been awakened by Lambert's second marriage that the answer to his letter should be of a conventional and non-committing kind; and so, when her brain was still on fire with hatred and invective, her facile pen glided pleasantly over the paper in stale felicitations and stereotyped badinage. It is hard to ask pity for Charlotte, whose many evil qualities have without pity been set down, but the seal of ign.o.ble tragedy had been set on her life; she had not asked for love, but it had come to her, twisted to burlesque by the malign hand of fate. There is pathos as well as humiliation in the thought that such a thing as a soul can be stunted by the trivialities of personal appearance, and it is a fact not beyond the reach of sympathy that each time Charlotte stood before her gla.s.s her ugliness spoke to her of failure, and goaded her to revenge.

It was a wet morning, but at half-past eleven o'clock the black horse was put into the phaeton, and Miss Mullen, attired in a shabby mackintosh, set out on her mission to Rosemount. A cold north wind drove the rain in her face as she flogged the old horse along through the shelterless desolation of rock and scrub, and in spite of her mackintosh she felt wet and chilled by the time she reached the Rosemount yard. She went into the kitchen by the back door, and delivered her message to Eliza Hackett, whom she found sitting in elegant leisure, retr.i.m.m.i.n.g a bonnet that had belonged to the late Mrs. Lambert.

"And is it the day after to-morrow, miss, please?" demanded Eliza Hackett with cold resignation.

"It is, me poor woman, it is," replied Charlotte, in the tone of facetious intimacy that she reserved for other people's servants. "You'll have to stir your stumps to get the house ready for them."

"The house is cleaned down and ready for them as soon as they like to walk into it," replied Eliza Hackett with dignity, "and if the new lady faults the drawing-room chimbley for not being swep, the master will know it's not me that's to blame for it, but the sweep that's gone dhrilling with the Mileetia."

"Oh, she's not the one to find fault with a man for being a soldier any more than yourself, Eliza!" said Charlotte, who had pulled off her wet gloves and was warming her hands. "Ugh! How cold it is! Is there any place upstairs where I could sit while you were drying my things for me?"

The thought had occurred to her that it would not be uniteresting to look round the house, and as it transpired that fires were burning in the dining-room and in Mr. Lambert's study she left her wet cloak and hat in the kitchen and ascended to the upper regions. She glanced into the drawing-room as she pa.s.sed its open door, and saw the blue rep chairs ranged in a solemn circle, gazing with all their b.u.t.ton eyes at a tree-legged table in the centre of the room; the blinds were drawn down, and the piano was covered with a sheet; it was altogether as inexpressive of everything, except bad taste as was possible. Charlotte pa.s.sed on to the dining-room and stationed herself in front on an indifferent fire there, standing with her back to the chimney-piece and her eyes roving about in search of entertainment. Nothing was changed, except that the poor turkey-hen's medicine bottles and pill boxes no longer lurked behind the chimney-piece ornaments; the bare dinner-table suggested only how soon Francie would be seatead at its head, and Charlotte presently prowled on to Mr. Lambert's study at the end of the pa.s.sage, to look for a better fire, and a room less barren of incident.

The study grate did not fail of its reputation of being the best in the house, and Mr. Lambert's chair stood by the hearthrug in wide-armed invitation to the visitor. Charlotte sat down in it and slowly warmed one foot after the other, while the pain rose hot and unconquerable in her heart. The whole room was so gallingly familiar, so inseparably connected with the time when she had still a future, vague and improbable as it was, and could live in sufficient content on its slight sustenance. Another future had now to be constructed, she had already traced out some lines of it, and in the perfecting of these she would henceforward find the cure for what she was now suffering. She roused herself, and glancing towards the table saw that on it lay a heap of unopened newspapers and letters; she got up with alacrity, and addressed herself to the congenial task of examining each letter in succession.

"H'm! They're of a very bilious complexion," she said to herself. "There's one from Langford," turning it over and looking at the name on the back. "I wonder if he's ordering a Victoria for her ladyship. I wouldn't put it past him. Perhaps he'd like me to tell her whose money it was paid Langford's bill last year!"

She fingered the letter longingly, then, taking a hair-pin from the heavy coils of her hair, she inserted it under the flap of the envelope. Under her skilful manipulation it opened easily, and without tearing, and she took out its contents. They consisted of a short but severe letter from the head of the firm, asking for "a speedy settlement of this account, now so long overdue," and of the account in question. It was a bill of formidable amount, from which Charlotte soon gathered the fact that twenty pounds only of the money she had lent Lambert last May had found its way into the pockets of the coachbuilder. She replaced the bill and letter in the envelope, and, after a minute of consideration, took up for the second time two large and heavy letters that she had thrown aside when first looking through the heap. They had the stamp of the Lismoyle bank upon them, and obviously contained bank books. Charlotte saw at a glance that the hair-pin would be of no avail with these envelopes, and after another pause for deliberation she replaced all the letters in their original position, and went down the pa.s.sage to the top of the kitchen stairs.

"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 bra.s.s 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 antic.i.p.ated, 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 m.u.f.fled 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, asth.o.r.e," 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' G.o.d 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 a.s.sistance 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-cla.s.s 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, pa.s.sing 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," surrept.i.tiously 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 out 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! G.o.d 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 asth.o.r.e. 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 rea.s.suringly. "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 pa.s.sively 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 a.n.a.lyse 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 circ.u.mstance. 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 grat.i.tude 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.

"Well, I took my time about calling on her," observed Mrs. Baker; "I thought I'd let her see I was in no hurry."

Mrs. Corkran, with whom Mrs. Baker was having tea, felt guiltily conscious of having called on Mrs. Lambert two days after her arrival, and hastened to remind the company of the pastoral nature of the attention.

"Oh, of course we know clergymen's families can't pick their company," went on Mrs. Baker, dismissing the interruption not without a secret satisfaction that Carrie Beattie, who, in the absense of Miss Corkran, was pouring out tea for her future mother-in-law, should see that other people did not consider the Rev. Joseph such a catch as she did. "Only that Lambert's such a friend of Mr. Baker's, and always banked with him, I declare I don't know that I'd have gone at all. I a.s.sure you it gave me quite a turn to see her stuck up there in poor Lucy Lambert's chair, talking about the grand hotels that she was in, in London and Paris, as if she never swept out a room or cleaned a saucepan in her life."

"She had all the walls done round with those penny fans," struck in Miss Kathleen Baker, "and a box of French bongbongs out on the table; and oh, mamma! did you notice the big photograph of him and her together on the chimney-piece?"

"I could notice nothing, Kathleen, and I didn't want to notice them" replied Mrs. Baker; "I could think of nothing but of what poor Lucy Lambert would say to see her husband dancing attendance on that young hussy without so much as a mourning ring on him, and her best tea-service thrashed about as if it was kitchen delft."

"Was he very devoted, Mrs. Baker?" asked Miss Beattie with a simper.

"Oh, I suppose he was," answered Mrs. Baker, as if in contempt for any sentiment inspired by Francie, "but I can't say I observed anything very particular."

"Oh, then I did!" said Miss Baker with a nod of superior intelligence; "I was watching them all the time; every word she uttered he was listening to it, and when she asked for the tea-cosy he flew for it, and oh! the tender looks he cast at her!"

"Eliza Hackett told my Maria there was shocking waste going on in the house now; fires in the drawing-room from eight o'clock in the morning, and this the month of May!" said Mrs. Corkran with an approving eye at the cascade of cut paper that decked her own grate, "and the cold meat given to the boy that cleans the boots!"

"Roddy Lambert'll be sorry for it some day when it's too late," said Mrs. Baker darkly, "but men are all alike; it's out of sight out of mind with them!"

"Oh, Mrs. Baker," wheezed Mrs. Corkran with asthmatic fervour, "I think you're altogether too cynical; I'm sure that's not your opinion of Mr. Baker."

"I don't know what he might do if I was dead," replied Mrs. Baker, "but I'll answer for it he'll not be carrying on with Number Two while I'm alive, like other people I know!"

"Oh, don't say such things before these young ladies," said Mrs. Corkran; "I wish them no greater blessing of Providence than a good husband, and I think I may say that dear Carry will find one in my Joseph." The almost death-bed solemnity of this address paralysed the conversation for a moment, and Miss Beattie concealed her blushes by going to the window to see whose was the vehicle that had just driven by.

"Oh, it's Mr. Hawkins!" she exclaimed, feeling the importance of the information.

Kathleen Baker sprang from her seat and ran to the window. "So it is!" she cried, "and I bet you sixpence he's going to Rosemount! My goodness, I wish it was to-day we had gone there!"

CHAPTER XLIII.

Hawkins had, like Mrs. Baker, been in no hurry to call upon the bride. He had seen her twice in church, he had once met her out driving with her husband, and, lastly, he had come upon her face to face in the princ.i.p.al street of Lismoyle, and had received a greeting of aristocratic hauteur, as remarkable as the newly acquired English accent in which it was delivered. After these things a visit to her was unavoidable, and, in spite of a bad conscience, he felt, when he at last set out for Rosemount, an excitment that was agreeable after the calm of life at Lismoyle.

There was no one in the drawing-room when he was shown into it, and as the maid closed the door behind him he heard a quick step run through the hall land up the stairs. "Gone to put on her best bib and tucker," he said to himself with an increase of confidence; "I'll bet she saw me coming." The large photograph alluded to by Miss Baker was on the chimneypiece, and he walked over and examined it with great interest. It obeyed the traditions of honeymoon portraits, and had the inevitable vulgarity of such; Lambert, sitting down, turned the leaves of a book, and Francie, standing behind him, rested one hand on his shoulder, while the other held a basket of flowers. In spite of its fatuity as a composition, both portraits were good, and they had moreover an air of prosperity and new clothes that Mr. Hawkins found to be almost repulsive. He studied the photograph with deepening distaste until he was aware of a footstep at the door, and braced himself for the encounter, with his heart beating uncomfortably and unexpectedly.