The Real Charlotte Part 16

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

Few possessed of any degree of imagination can turn their backs on a churchyard, after having witnessed there the shovelling upon and stamping down of the last poor refuge of that which all feel to be superfluous, a mere fragment of the inevitable debris of life, without a clinging hope that in some way or other the process may be avoided for themselves. In spite of philosophy, the body will not picture its surrender to the sordid thraldom of the undertaker and the mastery of the spade, and preferably sees itself falling through cold miles of water to some vague resting-place below the tides, or wedged beyond search in the grip of an ice crack, or swept as grey ash into a cinerary urn; anything rather than the prisoning coffin and blind weight of earth. So Christopher thought impatiently, as he drove back to Bruff from Mrs. Lambert's funeral, in the dismal solemnity of black clothes and a brougham, while the distant rattle of a reaping-machine was like a voice full of the health and energy of life, that talked on of harvest, and would not hear of graves.

That the commonplace gloom of a funeral should have plunged his general ideas into despondency is, however, too much to believe of even such a supersensitive mind as Christopher's. It gave a darker wash of colour to what was already clouded, and probably it was its trite, terrific sneer at human desire and human convention that deadened his heart from time to time with fatalistic suggestion; but it was with lesser facts than these that he strove. Miss Mullen depositing hysterically a wreath upon her friend's coffin, in the acute moment of lowering it into the grave; Miss Mullen sitting hysterically beside him in the carriage as he drove her back to Tally Ho in the eyes of all men; Miss Mullen lying, still hysterical, on her drawing-room sofa, holding in her black-gloved hand a tumbler of sal volatile and water, and eventually commanding her emotion sufficiently to ask him to bring her, that afternoon, a few books and papers, to quiet her nerves, and to rob of its weariness the bad night that would inevitably be her portion.

It was opposite these views, which, as far as tears went, might well be called dissolving, that his mind chiefly took its stand, in unutterable repugnance, and faint endeavour to be blind to his own convictions. He was being chased. Now that he knew it he wondered how he could ever have been unaware of it; it was palpable to anyone, and he felt in advance what it would be like to hear the exultant winding of the huntsman's horn, if the quarry were overtaken. The position was intolerable from every rational point of view; Christopher with his lethargic scorn of social tyrannies and stale maxims of cla.s.s, could hardly have believed that he was sensible of so many of these points, and despised himself accordingly. Julia Duffy's hoa.r.s.e voice still tormented his ear in involuntary spasms of recollection, keeping constantly before him the thought of the afternoon of four days ago, when he and Francie had been informed of the destiny allotted to them. The formless and unquestioned dream through which he had glided had then been broken up, like some sleeping stretch of river when the jaws of the dredger are dashed into it, and the mud is dragged to light, and the soiled waves carry the outrage onward in ceaseless escape. Nothing now could place him where he had been before, nor could he wish to regain that purposeless content. It was better to look things in the face at last, and see where they were going to end. It was better to know himself to be Charlotte's prize than to give up Francie.

This was what it meant, he said to himself, while he changed his funereal garb, and tried to get into step with the interrupted march of the morning. The alternative had been with him for four days, and now, while he wrote his letters, and sat at luncheon, and collected the books that were to interpose between Miss Mullen and her grief, the choice became more despotic than ever, in spite of the antagonism that met it in every surrounding. All the chivalry that smouldered under the modern malady of exhausted enthusiasm ranged itself on Francie's side; all the poetry in which he had steeped his mind, all his own poetic fancy, combined to blind him to many things that he would otherwise have seen. He acquited her of any share in her cousin's coa.r.s.e scheming with a pa.s.sionateness that in itself testified to the terror lest it might be true. He had idealised her to the pitch that might have been expected, and clothed her with his own refinement, as with a garment, so that it was her position that hurt him most, her embarra.s.sment that shamed him beyond his own.

Christopher's character is easier to feel than to describe; so conscious of its own weakness as to be almost incapable of confident effort, and with a soul so humble and straightforward that it did know its own strength and simplicity. Some dim understanding of him must have reached Francie, with her ignorant sentimentalities and her Dublin brogue; and as a sea-weed stretches vague arms up towards the light through the conflict of the tides, her pliant soul rose through its inherited vulgarities, and gained some vision of higher things. Christopher could not know how unparalleled a person he was in her existence, of how wholly unknown a type. Hawkins and he had been stars of unimagined magnitude; but though she had attained to the former's sphere with scarcely an effort, Christopher remained infinitely remote. She could scarcely have believed that as he drove from Bruff in the quiet suns.h.i.+ne of the afternoon, and surmounted the hill near its gate, the magic that she herself had newly learned about was working its will with him.

The corn that had stood high between him and Francie that day when he had ridden back to look after her, was bound in sheaves on the yellow upland, and the foolish omen set his pulses going. If she were now pa.s.sing along that other road there would be nothing between him and her. He had got past the stage of reason, even his power of mocking at himself was dead, or perhaps it was that there seemed no longer anything that could be mocked at. In spite of his knowledge of the world the position had an aspect that was so serious and beautiful as to overpower the others, and to become one of the mysteries of life into which he had thought himself too cheap and shallow to enter. A few weeks ago a visit to Tally Ho would have been a penance and a weariness of the flesh, a thing to be groaned over with Pamela, and endured only for the sake of collecting some new pearl of rhetoric from Miss Mullen. Now each thought of it brought again the enervating thrill, the almost sickening feeling of subdued excitement and expectation.

It was the Lismoyle market-day, and Christopher made his way slowly along the street, squeezing between carts and barrels, separating groups locked together in the extremity of bargaining, and doing what in him lay to avoid running over the old women, who, blinded by their overhanging hoods and deaf by nature, paraded the centre of the thoroughfare with a fine obliviousness of dog-carts and their drivers. Most of the better cla.s.s of shops had their shutters up in recognition of the fact that Mrs. Lambert, a customer whom neither co-operative stores or eighteenpenny teas had been able to turn from her allegiance, had this morning pa.s.sed their doors for the last time, in slow incongruous pomp, her silver-mounted coffin commanding all eyes as the gla.s.s-sided hea.r.s.e moved along with its quivering bunches of black plumes. The funeral was still a succulent topic in the gabble of the market; Christopher heard here and there such s.n.a.t.c.hes of it as: "Rest her sowl, the crayture! 'Tis she was the good wife, and more than all, she was the beautiful housekeeper!"

"Is it he lonesome afther her? No, nor if he berrid ten like her."

"She was a spent little woman always, and 'tis she that doted down on him."

"And ne'er a child left afther her! Well, she must be exshcused."

"Musha, I'd love her bones!" shouted Nance the Fool, well aware of the auditor in the dog-cart, "there wasn't one like her in the nation, nor in the world, no, nor in the town o' Galway!"

Towards the end of the street, at the corner of a lane leading to the quay, something like a fight was going on, and, as he approached, Christopher saw, over the heads of an admiring audience, the infuriated countenance of a Lismoyle beggar-woman, one of the many who occasionally legalised their existence by selling fish, between long bouts of mendicancy and drunkenness. Mary Norris was apparently giving what she would call the length and breadth of her tongue to some customer who had cast doubts upon the character of her fish, a customer who was for the moment quiescent, and hidden behind the tall figure of her adversary.

"Whoever says thim throuts isn't leppin' fresh out o'the lake he's a dom liar, and it's little I think of tellin' it t'ye up to yer nose! There's not one in the counthry but knows yer thricks and yer chat, and ye may go home out o' that, with yer bag sthrapped round ye, and ye can take the tay-laves and the dhrippin' from the servants, and huxther thim to feed yer cats, but thanks be to G.o.d ye'll take nothing out o'my basket this day!"

There was a t.i.tter of horrified delight from the crowd.

"Ye never spoke a truer word than that, Mary Norris," replied a voice that sent a chill down Christopher's back; "when I come into Lismoyle, it's not to buy rotten fish from a drunken fish-f.a.g, that'll be begging for crusts at my hall-door to-morrow. If I hear another word out of yer mouth I'll give you and your fish to the police, and the streets'll be rid of you and yer infernal tongue for a week, at all events, and the prison'll have a treat that it's pretty well used to!"

Another t.i.tter rewarded this sally, and Charlotte, well pleased, turned to walk away. As she did so, she caught sight of Christopher, looking at her with an expression from which he had not time to remove his emotions, and for a moment she wished that the earth would open and swallow her up. She reddened visibly, but recovered herself, and at once made her way out into the street towards him.

"How are you again, Mr. Dysart? You just came in time to get a specimen of the res angusta domi," she said, in a voice that contrasted almost ludicrously with her last utterances. "People like David, who talk about the advantages of poverty, have probably never tried buying fish in Lismoyle. It's always the way with these drunken old hags. They repay your charity by impudence and bad language, and one has to speak pretty strongly to them to make one's meaning penetrate to their minds."

Her eyes were still red and swollen from her violent crying at the funeral. But for them, Christopher could hardly have believed that this was the same being whom he had last seen on the sofa at Tally Ho, with the black gloves and the sal volatile.

"Oh yes, of course," he said vaguely; "everyone has to undergo Mary Norris some time or other. If you are going back to Tally Ho now, I can drive you there."

The invitation was lukewarm as it well could be, but had it been the most fervent in the world Charlotte had no intention of accepting it.

"No thank you, Mr. Dysart. I'm not done my marketing yet, but Francie's at home and she'll give you tea. Don't wait for me. I've no appet.i.te for anything to-day. I only came out to get a mouthful of fresh air, in hopes it might give me a better night, though, indeed, I've small chance of it after what I've gone through."

Christopher drove on, and tried not to think of Miss Mullen or of his mother or Pamela, while his too palpably discreet hostess elbowed her way through the crowd in the opposite direction.

Francie was sitting in the drawing-room awaiting her visitor. She had been up very early making the wreath of white asters that Charlotte had laid on Mrs. Lambert's coffin, and had shed some tears over the making of it, for the sake of the kindly little woman who had never been anything but good to her. She had spent a trying morning in ministering to Charlotte; after her early dinner she had dusted the drawing-room, and refilled the vases in a manner copied as nearly as possible from Pamela's arrangement of flowers; and she was now feeling as tired as might reasonably have been expected. About Christopher she felt thoroughly disconcerted and out of conceit with herself. It was strange that she, like him, should least consider her own position when she thought about the things that Julia Duffy had said to them; her motive was very different, but it touched the same point. It was the effect upon Christopher that she ceaselessly pictured, that she longed to understand; whether or not he believed what he had heard, and whether, if he believed, he would ever be the same to her. His desertion would have been much less surprising than his allegiance, but she would have felt it very keenly, with the same aching resignation with which we bear one of nature's acts of violence. When she met him this morning her embarra.s.sment had taken the simple form of distance and avoidance, and a feeling that she could never show him plainly enough that she, at least, had no designs upon him; yet, through it all, she clung to the belief that he would not change towards her. It was burning humiliation to see Charlotte spread her nets in the sight of the bird, but it did not prevent her from dressing herself as becomingly as she could when the afternoon came, nor, so ample are the domains of sentiment, did some nervous expectancy in the spare minutes before Christopher arrived deter her from taking out of her pocket a letter worn by long sojourn there, and reading it with delaying and softened eyes.

Her correspondence with Hawkins had been fraught with difficulties; in fact, it had been only by the aid of a judicious s.h.i.+lling and an old pair of boots bestowed on Louisa, that she had ensured to herself a first sight of the contents of the post-bag, before it was conveyed, according to custom, to Miss Mullen's bedroom. Somehow since Mr. Hawkins had left Hythe and gone to Yorks.h.i.+re the quant.i.ty and quality of his letters had dwindled surprisingly. The three thick weekly budgets of sanguine antic.i.p.ation and profuse endearments had languished into a sheet or two every ten days of affectionate retrospect in which less and less reference was made to breaking off his engagement with Miss Coppard, that trifling and summary act which was his ostensible mission in going to his fiancee's house; and this, the last letter from him, had been merely a few lines of excuse for not having written before, ending with regret that his leave would be up in a fortnight, as he had had a ripping time on old Coppard's moor, and the cubbing was just beginning, a remark which puzzled Francie a good deal, though its application was possibly clearer to her than the writer had meant it to be. Inside the letter was a photograph of himself, that had been done at Hythe, and was transferred by Francie from letter to letter, in order that it might never leave her personal keeping; and, turning from the barren trivialities over which she had been poring, Francie fell to studying the cheerful, unintellectual face therein portrayed above the trim glories of a mess jacket.

She was still looking at it when she heard the expected wheels; she stuffed the letter back into her pocket, then, remembering the photograph, pulled the letter out again and put it into it. She was putting the letter away for the second time when Christopher came in, and in her guilty self-consciousness she felt that he must have noticed the action.

"How did you get in so quickly?" she said, with a confusion that heightened the general effect of discovery.

"Donovan was there and took the trap," said Christopher, "and the hall door was open, so I came in."

He sat down, and neither seemed certain for a moment as to what to say next.

"I didn't really expect you to come, Mr. Dysart," began Francie, the colour that the difficulty with the photograph had given her ebbing slowly away; "you have a right to be tired as well as us, and Charlotte being upset that way and all, made it awfully late before you got home I'm afraid."

"I met her a few minutes ago, and was glad to see that she was all right again," said Christopher perfunctorily; "but certainly if I had been she, and had had any option in the matter, I should have stayed at home this morning."

Both felt the awkwardness of discussing Miss Mullen, but it seemed a shade less than the awkwardness of ignoring her.

"She was such a friend of poor Mrs. Lambert's," said Francie; "and I declare," she added, glad of even this trivial chance of showing herself antagonistic to Charlotte, "I think she delights in funerals."

"She has a peculiar way of showing her delight," replied Christopher, with just enough ill-nature to make Francie feel that her antagonism was understood and sympathised with.

Francie gave an irrepressible laugh. "I don't think she minds crying before people. I wish everyone minded crying as little as she does."

Christopher looked at her, and thought he saw something about her eyes that told of tears.

"Do you mind crying?" he said, lowering his voice, while more feeling escaped into his glance than he had intended; "it doesn't seem natural that you should ever cry."

"You're very inquisitive!" said Francie, the sparkle coming back to her eye in a moment; "why shouldn't I cry if I choose?"

"I should not like to think that you had anything to make you cry."

She looked quickly at him to see if his face were as sincere as his voice; her perceptions were fine enough to suggest that it would be typical of Christopher to show her by a special deference and friendliness that he was sorry for her, but now, as ever, she was unable to cla.s.sify those delicate shades of manner and meaning that might have told her where his liking melted into love. She had been accustomed to see men as trees, walking beings about whose individuality of character she did not trouble herself; generally they made love to her, and, if they did not, she presumed that they did not care about her, and gave them no further attention. But this test did not seem satisfactory in Christopher's case.

"I know what everyone thinks of me," she said, a heart truth welling to the surface as she felt herself pitied and comprehended; "no one believes I ever have any trouble about anything."

Christopher's heart throbbed at the bitterness in a voice that he had always known so wholly careless and undisturbed; it increased his pity for her a thousandfold, but it stirred him with a strange and selfish pleasure to think that she had suffered. Whatever it was that was in her mind, it had given him a glimpse of that deeper part of her nature, so pa.s.sionately guessed at, so long unfindable. He did not for an instant think of Hawkins, having explained away that episode to himself some time before in the light of his new reading of Francie's character; it was Charlotte's face as she confronted Mary Norris in the market that came to him, and the thought of what it must be to be under her roof and dependent on her. He saw now the full pain that Francie bore in hearing herself proclaimed as the lure by which he was to be captured, and that he should have brought her thus low roused a tenderness in him that would not be gainsaid.

"I don't think it," he said, stammering; "you might believe that I think more about you than other people do. I know you feel things more than you let anyone see, and that makes it all the worse for anyone who-who is sorry for you, and wants to tell you so-"

This halting statement, so remarkably different in diction from the leisurely sentences in which Christopher usually expressed himself, did not tend to put Francie more at her ease. She reddened slowly and painfully as his short-sighted, grey eyes rested upon her. Hawkins filled so prominent a place in her mind that Christopher's ambiguous allusions seemed to be directed absolutely at him, and her hand instinctively slipped into her pocket and clasped the letter that was there, as if in that way she could hold her secret fast.

"Ah, well,"-she tried to say it lightly-"I don't want so very much pity yet awhile; when I do, I'll ask you for it!"

She disarmed the words of their flippancy by the look with which she lifted her dark-lashed eyes to him, and Christopher's last shred of common sense sank in their tender depths and was lost there.

"Is that true?" he said, without taking his eyes from her face. "Do you really trust me? would you promise always to trust me?"

"Yes, I'm sure I'd always trust you," answered Francie, beginning in some inexplicable way to feel frightened; "I think you're awfully kind."

"No, I am not kind," he said, turning suddenly very white, and feeling his blood beating down to his finger-tips; "you must not say that when you know it's-" Something seemed to catch in his throat and take his voice away. "It gives me the greatest pleasure to do anything for you," he ended lamely.

The clear crimson deepened in Francie's checks. She knew in one startling instant what Christopher meant, and her fingers twined and untwined themselves in the crochet sofa-cover as she sat, not daring to look at him, and not knowing in the least what to say.

"How can I be kind to you?" went on Christopher, his vacillation swept away by the look in her downcast face that told him she understood him; "it's just the other way, it's you who are kind to me. If you only knew what happiness it is to me-to-to be with you-to do anything on earth for you-you know what I mean-I see you know what I mean."

A vision rose up before Francie of her past self, loitering about the Dublin streets, and another of an incredible and yet possible future self, dwelling at Bruff in purple and fine linen, and then she looked up and met Christopher's eyes. She saw the look of tortured uncertainty and avowed purpose that there was no mistaking; Bruff and its glories melted away before it, and in their stead came Hawkins' laughing face, his voice, his touch, his kiss, in overpowering contrast to the face opposite to her, with its uncomprehended intellect and refinement, and its pale anxiety.

"Don't say things like that to me, Mr. Dysart," she said tremulously; "I know how good you are to me, twice, twice too good, and if I was in trouble, you'd be the first I'd come to. But I'm all right," with an attempted gaiety and unconcern that went near bringing the tears to her eyes; "I can paddle my own canoe for a while yet!"

Her instinct told her that Christopher would be quicker than most men to understand that she was putting up a line of defence, and to respect it; and with the unfailing recoil of her mind upon Hawkins, she thought how little such a method would have prevailed with him.

"Then you don't want me?" said Christopher, almost in a whisper.

"Why should I want you or anybody?" she answered, determined to misunderstand him, and to be like her usual self in spite of the distress and excitement that she felt; "I'm well able to look after myself, though you mightn't think it, and I don't want anything this minute, only my tea, and Norry's as cross as the cats, and I know she won't have the cake made!" She tried to laugh, but the laugh faltered away into tears. She turned her head aside, and putting one hand to her eyes, felt with the other in her pocket for her handkerchief. It was underneath Hawkins' letter, and as she s.n.a.t.c.hed it out, it carried the letter along with it.

Christopher had started up, unable to bear the sight of her tears, and as he stood there, hesitating on the verge of catching her in his arms, he saw the envelope slip down on to the floor. As it fell, the photograph slid out of its worn covering, and lay face uppermost at his feet. He picked it up, and having placed it with the letter on the sofa beside Francie, he walked to the window and looked sightlessly out into the garden. A heavily-laden tray b.u.mped against the door, the handle turned, and Louisa, having pushed the door open with her knee, staggered in with the tea-tray. She had placed it on the table and was back again in the kitchen, talking over the situation with Bid Sal, before Christopher spoke.

"I am afraid I can't stay any longer," he said, in a voice that was at once quieter and rougher than its wont; "you must forgive me if anything that I said has-has hurt you-I didn't mean it to hurt you." He stopped short and walked towards the door. As he opened it, he looked back at her for an instant, but he did not speak again.

END OF VOL. II.

VOLUME III.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.

The kitchen at Tally Ho generally looked its best at ten o'clock in the morning. Its best is, in this case, a relative term, implying the temporary concealment of the plates, loaves of bread, dirty rubbers, and jampots full of congealed dripping that usually adorned the tables, and the sweeping of out-lying potato-skins and cinders into a chasm beneath the disused hot hearth. When these things had been done, and Bid Sal and her bare feet had been effaced into some outer purlieu, Norry felt that she was ready to receive the Queen of England if necessary, and awaited the ordering of dinner with her dress let down to its full length, a pa.s.sably clean ap.r.o.n, and an expression of severe and exalted resignation. On the morning now in question Charlotte was standing in her usual position, with her back to the fire and her hands spread behind her to the warmth, scanning with a general's eye the routed remnants of yesterday's dinner, and debating with herself as to the banner under which they should next be rallied.

"A curry I think, Norry," she called out; "plenty of onions and apples in it, and that's all ye want."

"Oh, musha! G.o.d knows ye have her sickened with yer curries," replied Norry's voice from the larder, "'twas ere yestherday ye had the remains of th' lrish stew in curry, an' she didn't ate what'd blind your eye of it. Wasn't Louisa tellin' me!"

"And so I'm to order me dinners to please Miss Francie!" said Charlotte, in tones of surprising toleration; "well, ye can make a haricot of it if ye like. Perhaps her ladys.h.i.+p will eat that."

"Faith 'tis aiqual to me what she ates-" here came a clatter of crockery, and a cat shot like a comet from the larder door, followed by Norry's foot and Norry's blasphemy-"or if she never ate another bit. And where's the carrots to make a haricot? Bid Sal's afther tellin' me there's ne'er a one in the garden; but sure, if ye sent Bid Sal to look for salt wather in the say she wouldn't find it!"

Miss Mullen laughed approvingly. "There's carrots in plenty; and see here, Norry, you might give her a jam dumpling-use the gooseberry jam that's going bad. I've noticed meself that the child isn't eating, and it won't do to have the people saying we're starving her."

"Whoever'll say that, he wasn't looking at me yestherday, and I makin' the cake for herself and Misther Dysart! Eight eggs, an' a cupful of sugar and a cupful of b.u.t.ther, and G.o.d knows what more went in it, an' the half of me day gone bating it, and afther all they left it afther thim!"

"And whose fault was that but your own for not sending it up in time?" rejoined Charlotte, her voice sharpening at once to vociferative argument; "Miss Francie told me that Mr. Dysart was forced to go without his tea."

"Late or early I'm thinkin' thim didn't ax it nor want it," replied Norry, issuing from the larder with a basketful of crumpled linen in her arms, and a visage of the utmost sourness; "there's your clothes for ye now, that was waitin' on me yestherday to iron them, in place of makin' cakes."

She got a bowl of water and began to sprinkle the clothes and roll them up tightly, preparatory to ironing them, her ill-temper imparting to the process the air of whipping a legion of children and putting them to bed. Charlotte came over to the table and, resting her hands on it, watched Norry for a few seconds in silence.

"What makes you say they didn't want anything to eat?" she asked; "was Miss Francie ill, or was anything the matter with her?"

"How do I know what ailed her?" replied Norry, pounding a pillow-case with her fist before putting it away; "I have somethin' to do besides follyin' her or mindin' her."

"Then what are ye talking about?"

"Ye'd betther ax thim that knows. 'Twas Louisa seen her within in the dhrawn'-room, an' whatever was on her she was cryin'; but, sure, Louisa tells lies as fast as a pig'd gallop."

"What did she say?" Charlotte darted the question at Norry as a dog snaps at a piece of meat.

"Then she said plinty, an' 'tis she that's able. If ye told that one a thing and locked the doore on her the way she couldn't tell it agin, she'd bawl it up the chimbley."

"Where's Louisa?" interrupted Charlotte impatiently.

"Meself can tell ye as good as Louisa," said Norry instantly taking offence; "she landed into the dhrawn-room with the tay, and there was Miss Francie sittin' on the sofa and her handkerchief in her eyes, and Misther Dysart beyond in the windy and not a word nor a stir out of him, only with his eyes shtuck out in the garden, an' she cryin' always."

"Psha! Louisa's a fool! How does she know Miss Francie was cryin'? I'll bet a s.h.i.+llin' 'twas only blowing her nose she was."

Norry had by this time spread a ragged blanket on the table, and, s.n.a.t.c.hing up the tongs, she picked out of the heart of the fire a red-hot heater and thrust it into a box-iron with unnecessary violence.

"An' why wouldn't she cry? Wasn't I listenin' to her cryin' in her room lasht night an' I goin' up to bed?" She banged the iron down on the table and began to rub it to and fro on the blanket. "But what use is it to cry, even if ye dhragged the hair out of yer head? Ye might as well be singin' an' dancin'."

She flung up her head, and stared across the kitchen under the wisps of hair that hung over her unseeing eyes with such an expression as Deborah the Prophetess might have worn. Charlotte gave a grunt of contempt, and picking Susan up from the bar of the table, she put him on her shoulder and walked out of the kitchen.

Francie had been since breakfast sitting by the window of the dining-room, engaged in the cheerless task of darning a stocking on a soda-water bottle. Mending stockings was not an art that she excelled in; she could trim a hat or cut out a dress, but the dark, unremunerative toil of mending stockings was as distasteful to her as stone-breaking to a tramp, and the simile might easily be carried out by comparing the results of the process to macadamising. It was a still, foggy morning; the boughs of the scarlet-blossomed fuchsia were greyed with moisture, and s.h.i.+ning drops studded the sash of the open window like sea-anemones. It was a day that was both close and chilly, and intolerable as the atmosphere of the Tally Ho dining-room would have been with the window shut, the breakfast things still on the table, and the all-pervading aroma of cats, the damp, lifeless air seemed only a shade better to Francie as she raised her tired eyes from time to time and looked out upon the discouraging prospect. Everything stood in the same trance of stillness in which it had been when she had got up at five o'clock and looked out at the sluggish dawn broadening in blank silence upon the fields. She had leaned out of her window till she had become cold through and through, and after that had unlocked her trunk, taken out Hawkins' letters, and going back to bed had read and re-read them there. The old glamour was about them; the convincing sincerity and a.s.surance that was as certain of her devotion as of his own, and the unfettered lavishness of expression that made her turn hot and cold as she read them. She had time to go through many phases of feeling before the chapel-bell began to ring for eight o'clock matins, and she stole down to the kitchen to see if the post had come in. The letters were lying on the table; three or four for Charlotte, the local paper, a circular about peat litter addressed to the Stud-groom, Tally Ho, and, underneath all, the thick, rough envelope with the ugly boyish writing that had hardly changed since Mr. Hawkins had written his first letters home from Cheltenham College. Francie caught it up, and was back in her own room in the twinkling of an eye. It contained only a few words.

"Dearest Francie, only time for a line to-day to say that I am staying on here for another week, but I hope ten days will see me back at the old mill. I want you like a good girl to keep things as dark as possible. I don't see my way out of this game yet. No more to-day. Just off to play golf, the girls here are nailers at it. Thine ever, Gerald."

This was the ration that had been served out to her hungry heart, the word that she had wearied for for a week; that once more he had contrived to postpone his return, and that the promise he had made to her under the tree in the garden was as far from being fulfilled as ever. Christopher Dysart would not have treated her this way, she thought to herself as she stooped over her darning and bit her lip to keep it from quivering, but then she would not have minded much whether he wrote to her or not- that was the worst of it. Francie had always confidently announced to her Dublin circle of friends her intention of marrying a rich man, good-looking, and a lord if possible, but certainly rich. But here she was, on the morning after what had been a proposal, or what had amounted to one, from a rich young man who was also nice-looking, and almost the next thing to a lord, and instead of sitting down triumphantly to write the letter that should thrill the North Side down to its very grocers' shops, she was darning stockings, red-eyed and dejected, and pondering over how best to keep from her cousin any glimmering of what had happened. All her old self-posed and struck att.i.tudes before the well-imagined mirror of her friends' minds, and the vanity that was flattered by success cried out petulantly against the newer soul that enforced silence upon it. She felt quite impartially how unfortunate it was that she should have given her heart to Gerald in this irrecoverable way, and then with a headlong charge of ideas she said to herself that there was no one like him, and she would always, always care for him and n.o.body else.

This point having been emphasised by a tug at her needle that snapped the darning cotton, Miss Fitzpatrick was embarking upon a more pleasurable train of possibilities when she heard Charlotte's foot in the hall, and fell all of a sudden down to the level of the present. Charlotte came in and shut the door with her usual decisive slam; she went over to the side-board and locked up the sugar and jam with a sharp glance to see if Louisa had tampered with either, and then sat down at her davenport near Francie and began to look over her account books.

"Well, I declare," she said after a minute or two, "it's a funny thing that I have to buy eggs, with my yard full of hens! This is a state of things unheard of till you came into the house, my young lady!"

Francie looked up and saw that this was meant as a pleasantry.

"Is it me? I wouldn't touch an egg to save my life!"

"Maybe you wouldn't," replied Charlotte with the same excessive jocularity, "but you can give tea-parties, and treat your friends to sponge-cakes that are made with nothing but eggs!"

Francie scented danger in the air, and having laughed nervously to show appreciation of the jest, tried to change the conversation.

"How do you feel to-day, Charlotte?" she asked, working away at her stocking with righteous industry; "is your headache gone? I forgot to ask after it at breakfast."

"Headache? I'd forgotten I'd ever had one. Three tabloids of antipyrin and a good night's rest; that was all I wanted to put me on my pegs again. But if it comes to that, me dear child, I'd trouble you to tell me what makes you the colour of blay calico last night and this morning? It certainly wasn't all the cake you had at afternoon tea. I declare I was quite vexed when I saw that lovely cake in the larder, and not a bit gone from it."