The Real Charlotte Part 21

They shook hands with the politeness of slight acquaintance, and sat down, Hawkins thinking he had never seen her look so pretty or so smart, and wondering what he was going to talk to her about. It was evidently going to be war to the knife, he thought, as he embarked haltingly upon the weather, and found that he was far less at his ease than he had expected to be.

"Yes, it's warmer here than it was in England," said Francie, looking languidly at the rings on her left hand; "we were persihed there after Paris."

She felt that the familiar mention of such names must of necessity place her in a superior position, and she was so stimulated by their a.s.sociations with her present grandeur that she raised her eyes, and looked at him. Their eyes met with as keen a sense of contact as if their hands had suddenly touched, and each, with a perceptible jerk, looked away.

"You say that Paris was hot, was it?" said Hawkins, with something of an effort. "I haven't been there since I went with some people the year before last, and it was as hot then as they make it. I thought it rather a hole."

"Oh, indeed?" said Francie, chillingly; "Mr. Lambert and I enjoyed it greatly. You've been here all the spring, I suppose?"

"Yes; I haven't been out of this place, except for Punchestown, since I came back from leave;" then with a reckless feeling that he would break up this frozen sea of plat.i.tudes, "since that time that I met you on the pier at Kingstown."

"Oh yes," said Francie, as if trying to recall some unimportant incident; "you were there with the Dysarts, weren't you?"

Hawkins became rather red. She was palpably overdoing it, but that did not diminish the fact that he was being snubbed, and though he might, in a general and guarded way, have admitted that he deserved it, he realised that he bitterly resented being snubbed by Francie.

"Yes," he said, with an indifference as deliberately exaggerated as her own, "I tavelled over with them. I remember how surprised we were to see you and Mr. Lambert there."

She felt the intention on his part to say something disagreeable, and it stung her more than the words.

"Why were you surprised?" she asked coolly.

"Well-er-I don't exactly know," stammered Mr. Hawkins, a good deal taken aback by the directness of the inquiry; "we didn't exactly know where you were-thought Lambert was at Lismoyle, you know." He bagan to wish he had brought Cursiter with him; no one could have guessed that she would have turned into such a cat and given herself such airs; her ultra-refinement, and her affected accent, and her exceeding prettiness, exasperated him in a way that he could not have explained, and though the visit did not fail of excitement, he could not flatter himself that he was taking quite the part in it that he had expected. Certainly Mrs. Lambert was not maintaining the role that he had allotted her; huffiness was one thing, but infernal swagger was quite another. It is painful for a young man of Mr. Hawkins' type to realise that an affection that he has inspired can wane and even die, and Francie's self-possession was fast robbing him of his own.

"I hear that your regiment is after being ordered to India?" she said cheerfully, when it became apparent that Hawkins could find no more to say.

"Yes, so they say; next trooping season will about see us I expect, and they're safe to send us to Aldershot first, so we may be out of this at any minute." He glanced at her as he spoke, to see how she took it.

"Oh, that'll be very nice for you," answered Francie still more cheerfully. "I suppose," she went on with her most aristocratic drawl,"that you'll be married before you go out?"

She had arranged the delivery of this thrust before she came downstairs, and it glided from her tongue as easily as she could have wished.

"Yes, I daresay I shall," he answered defiantly, though the provokingly ready blush of fair man leaped to his face. He looked at her, angry with himself for reddening, and angrier with her for blazoning her indifference, by means of a question that seemed to him the height of bad taste and spitefulness. As he looked, the colour that burned in his own face repeated itself in hers with slow relentlessness; at the sight of it a sudden revulsion of feeling brought him dangeroulsy near to calling her by her name, with reproaches for her heartlessness, but before the word took form she had risen quickly, and, saying something incoherent about ordering tea, moved towards the bell, her head turned from him with the helpless action of a shy child.

Hawkins, hardly knowing what he was doing, started forward, and as he did so the door opened, and a well-known voice announced "Miss Charlotte Mullen!"

The owner of the voice advanced into the room, and saw, as anyone must have seen, the flushed faces of its two occupants, and felt that nameless quality in the air that tells of interruption.

"I took the liberty of announcing myself," she said, with her most affable smile; "I knew you were at home, as I saw Mr. Hawkins' trap at the door, and I just walked in."

As she shook hands and sat down she expanded easily into a facetious description of the difficulties of getting her old horse along the road from Gurthnamuckla, and by the time she had finished her story Hawkins' complexion had regained its ordinary tone, and Francie had resumed the air of elegant nonchalance appropriate to the importance of the married state. Nothing, in fact, could have been more admirable than Miss Mullen's manner. She praised Francie's new chair covers and Indian tea; she complimented Mr. Hawkins on his new pony; even going so far as to reproach him for not having been out to Gurthnamuckla to see her, till Francie felt some p.r.i.c.ks of conscience about the sceptical way that she and Lambert had laughed together over Charlotte's amiability when she paid her first visit to them. She found inexpressible ease in the presence of a third person as capable as Charlotte of carrying on a conversation with the smallest possible a.s.sistance; shaltered by it she slowly recovered from her mental overthrow, and, furious as she was with Hawkins for his part in it, she was begnning to be able to patronise him again by the time that he got up to go away.

"Well, Francie, my dear child," began Charlotte, as soon as the door had closed behind him, "I've scarcely had a word with you since you came home. You had such a reception the last day I was here that I had to content myself with talking to Mrs. Beattie, and hearing all about the price of underclothes. Indeed I had a good mind to tell her that only for your magnanimity she wouldn't be having so much to say about Carrie's trousseau!"

"Indeed she was welcome to him!" said Francie, putting her chin in the air, "that little wretch, indeed!"

It was one of the moments when she touched the extreme of satisfation in being married, and in order to cover, for her own and Charlotte's sake, the remembrance of that idiotic blush, she a.s.sumed a little extra bravado.

"Talking of your late admirers-" went on Charlotte, "for I hope for poor Roody's sake they're not present ones-I never saw a young fellow so improved in his manners as Mr. Hawkins. There was a time I didn't fancy him-as you may remember, though we've agreed to say nothing more about our old squabbles- but I think he's chastened by adversity. That engagement, you know-" she paused, and cast a side-long, un.o.btrusive glance at Francie. "He's not the first young man that's been whipped in before marriage as well as after it, and I think the more he looks at it the less he likes it."

"He's been looking at it a long time now," said Francie with a laugh that was intended to be careless, but into which a sneer made its way. "I wonder Roddy isn't in," she continued, changing the subject to one in which no pit-falls lurked; "I wouldn't be surprised if he'd gone to Gurthnamuckla to see you, Charlotte; he's been saying ever since we came back he wanted to have a talk with you, but he's been so busy he hadn't a minute."

"If I'm not greatly mistaken," said Charlotte, standing up so as to be able to see out of the window, "here's the man of the house himself. What horse is that he's on?" her eyes taking in with unwilling admiration the swaggering ease of seat and squareness of shoulder that had so often captivated her taste, as Lambert, not unaware of spectators at the window, overcame much callow remonstrance on the part of the young horse he was riding, at being asked to stand at the door till a boy came round to take him.

"Oh, that's the new four-year-old that Roddy had taken in off Gurthnamuckla while we were away," said Francie, leaning her elbow against the shutter and looking out too. "He's an awful wild young brat of a thing! Look at the way he's hoisting now! Roddy says he'll have me up on him beofe the summer's out, but I tell him that if he does I won't be on him long." Her eyes met her husband's, and she laughed and tapped on the gla.s.s, beckoning imperiously to him to come in.

Charlotte turned away from the window, and when, a few minutes afterwards, Mr. Lambert came into the room, the visitor had put her gloves on, and was making her farewells to her hostess.

"No, Roddy," she said, "I must be off now. I'm like the beggars, 'tay and turn out' is my motto. But supposing now that you bring this young lady over to lunch with me to-morrow-no, not to-morrow, that's Sunday-come on Monday. How would that suit your book?"

Lambert a.s.sented with a good grace that struck Francie as being wonderfull well a.s.sumed, and followed Miss Mullen out to put her in her phaeton.

Francie closed the door behind them, and sat down. She was glad she had met Hawkins and got it over, and as she reviewed the incidents of his visit, she thought that on the whole she had come very near her own ideal of behaviour. Cool, sarcastic, and dignified, even though she had, for one moment, got a little red, he could not but feel that she had acted as became a married lady, and shown him his place once for all. As for him, he had been horrible, she thought bitterly; sitting up and talking to her as if he had never seen her before, and going on as if he had never -she got up hastily as if to escape from the hateful memories of last year that thrust themselves suddenly into her thoughts. How thankful she was that she had shown him she was not inconsolable; she wished that Roddy had come in while he was there, and had stood over him, and overshadowed him with his long legs and broad shoulders, and his air of master of the house. Why on earth had Charlotte praised him? Gurthnamuckla must have had the most extraordinarily sweetening effect upon her, for she seemed to have a good word for everybody now, and Roddy's notion that she would want to be coaxed into a good temper was all nonsense, and conceited nonsense too, and so she would tell him. It was not in Francie's light, wholesome nature to bear malice; the least flutter of the olive branch, the faintest glimmer of the flag of truce, was enough to make her forgive an injury and forget an insult.

When her husband came back she turned towards him with a sparkle in her eye.

"Well, Roddy, I hope you squeezed her hand when you were saying good-bye! I daresay now you'll want me to believe that it's all in honour of you that she's asked us over to lunch to-morrow, and I suppose that's what she was telling you out in the hall. Aren't you sorry you didn't marry her instead of me?"

Lambert did not answer, but came over to where she was standing, and putting his arm round her, drew her towards him and kissed her with a pa.s.sion that seemed too serious an answer to her question. She could not know, as she laughed and hid her face from him, that he was saying to himself, "Of course he was bound to come and call, he'd have had to do that no matter who she was!"

CHAPTER XLIV.

Spring, that year, came delicately in among the Galway hills; in primroses, in wild bursts of gorse, and in the later snow of hawthorn, unbeaten by the rain or the wet west wind of rougher seasons. A cuckoo had dropped out of s.p.a.ce into the copse at the back of Gurthnamuckla, and kept calling there with a l.u.s.ty sweetness; a mist of green was breathed upon the trees, and in the meadows by the lake a corncrake was adding a diffident guttural or two to the chirruping chorus of coots and moorhens. Mr. Lambert's three-year-olds grew and flourished on the young rich gra.s.s, and, in the turbulence of their joie de vivre, hunted the lambs, and bit the calves, and jumped every barrier that the ingenuity of Miss Mullen's herdsman could devise. "Those brutes must be put into the Stone Field," the lady of the house had said, regarding their gambols with a sour eye; "I don't care whether the gra.s.s is good or bad, they'll have to do with it;" and when she and her guests went forth after their lunch to inspect the farm in general and the young horses in particular, it was to the Stone Field that they first bent their steps.

No one who has the idea of a green-embowered English lane can hope to realise the fortified alley that wound through the heart of the pastures of Gurthnamuckla, and was known as the Farm Lane. It was scarcely wide enough for two people to walk abreast; loose stone walls, of four or five feet in thickness, towered on either side of it as high as the head of a tall man; to meet a cow in it involved either retreat or the perilous ascent of one of the walls. It embodied the simple expedient of by-gone farmers for clearing their fields of stones, and contained raw material enough to build a church. Charlotte, Mr. Lambert and Francie advanced in single file along its meaningless windings, until it finished its career at the gate of the Stone Field, a long tongue of pasture that had the lake for a boundary on three of its sides, and was cut off from the mainland by a wall not inferior in height and solidity to those of the lane.

"There, Roddy," said Miss Mullen, as she opened the gate, "there's where I had to banish them, and I don't think they're too badly off."

The young horses were feeding at the farthest point of the field, fetlock deep in the flowery gra.s.s, with the sparkling blue of the lake making a background to their slender shapes.

"They look like money, Charlotte, I think. That brown filly ought to bring a hundred at least next Ballinasloe fair, when she knows how to jump," said Lambert, as he and Charlotte walked across the field, leaving Francie, who saw no reason for pretending an interest that was not expected of her, to amuse herself by picking cowslips near the gate.

"I'm glad to hear you say that, Roddy," replied Charlotte. "It's a comfort to think anything looks like money these bad times; I've never known prices so low."

"They're lower than I ever thought they'd go, by Jove," Lambert answered gloomily. "I'm going up to Mayo, collecting, next week, and if I don't do better there than I've done here, I daresay Dysart won't think so much of his father's shoes after all."

He was striding along, taking no trouble to suit his pace to Charlotte's, and perhaps the indifference to her companions.h.i.+p that it showed, as well as the effort involved in keeping beside him, had the effect of irritating her.

"Maybe he might think them good enough to kick people out with," she said with a disagreeable laugh; "I remember, in the good old times, when my father and Sir Benjamin ruled the roast, we heard very little about bad collections."

It struck Lambert that though this was the obvious moment for that business talk that he had come over for, it was not a propitious one. "I wonder if the macaroni cheese disagreed with her," he thought; "it was beastly enough to do it, anyhow. You may remember," he said aloud, "that in the good old times the property was worth just about double what it is now, and a matter of three or four hundred pounds either way made no difference to signify."

"D'ye think ye'll be that much short this time?"

She darted the question at him with such keenness that Lambert inwardly recoiled before it, though it was the point to which he had wished to bring her.

"Oh, of course one can't be sure," he said, retreating from his position; "but I've just got a sort of general idea that I'll be a bit under the mark this time."

He was instinctively afraid of Charlotte, but in this moment he knew, perhaps for the first time, how much afraid. In theory he believed in his old power over her, and clung to the belief with the fatuity of a vain man, but he had always been uncomfortably aware that she was intellectually his master, and though he thought he could still sway her heart with a caress, he knew he could never outwit her.

"Oh, no one knows better than I do what a thankless business it is, these times," said Charlotte with a rea.s.suring carelessness; "it's a case of 'pull, devil, pull, baker,' though indeed I don't know under which head poor Christopher Dysart comes. And as we've got on to the sordid topic of money, Roddy-I'm not going to ask yer honour for a reduction of the rint, ye needn't be afraid-but I've been rather pinched by the expense I've been put to in doing up the house and stocking the farm, and it would be mighty convaynient to me, if it would be convaynient to you, to let me have a hundred or so of that money I lent you last year."

"Well-Charlotte-" began Lambert, clearing his throat, and striking with his stick at the heads of the b.u.t.tercups, "that's the very thing I've been anxious to talk to you about. The fact is, I've had an awful lot of expense myself this last twelve months, and, as I told you, I can't lay a finger on anything except the interest of what poor Lucy left me-and-er-I'd give you any percentage you like, you know-?" He broke off for an instant, and then began again. "You can see for yourself what a sin it would be to sell those things now," he pointed at the three young horses, "when they'll just bring three times the money this time next year."

"Oh yes," said Charlotte, "but my creditors might say it was more of a sin for me not to pay my debts."

Lambert stood still, and dug his stick into the ground, and Charlotte, watching him, knew that she had put in her sickle and reaped her first sheaf.

"All right," he said, biting his lip, "if your creditors can manage to hold out till after the fair next week, I daresay by selling every horse I've got I could let you have your money then." As he made the offer, he trusted that its quixotic heroism would make Charlotte ashamed of herself; no woman could possibly expect such a sacrifice as that from a man, and the event proved that he was right.

This was not the sacrifice that Miss Mullen wished for.

"Oh, pooh, pooh, Roddy! you needn't take me up in such earnest as that," she said in her most friendly voice, and Lambert congratulated himself upon his astuteness; "I only meant that if you could let me have a hundred or so in the course of the next month, it would be a help to my finances."

Lambert could not bring himself to admit that he was as little able to pay her one hundred as three; at all events, a month would give him time to look about him, and if he made a good collection he could easily borrow it from the estate account.

"Oh, if that's all," he answered, affecting more relief than he felt, "I can let you have it in a fortnight or so."

They were near the lake by this time, and the young horses feeding by its margin flung up their heads and stared in statuesque surprise at their visitors.

"They'll not let you near them," said Charlotte, as Lambert walked slowly towards them; "they're as wild as hawks. And, goodness me! that girl's gone out of the field and left the gate open! Wait a minute till I go back and shut it."

Lambert stood and looked after her as she hastened c.u.mbrously back towards the gate, and wondered how he had ever liked her, or brought himself to have any dealings with her, and his eye left her quickly to follow the red parasol that, moving slowly along above the grey wall, marked Francie's progress along the lane. Charlotte hurried on towards the gate, well satisfied with the result of her conversation, and she was within some fifty yards of it when a loud and excited shout from Lambert, combined with the thud of galloping hoofs, made her start round. The young horses had been frightened by Lambert's approach, and after one or two circling swoops, had seen the open gate, and, headed by the brown filly, were careering towards it.

"The gate! Charlotte!" roared Lambert, rus.h.i.+ng futilely after the horses, "shut the gate!"

Charlotte was off in an instant, realising as quickly as Lambert what might happen if Francie were charged in the narrow lane by this living avalanche; even in the first instant of comprehension another idea had presented itself. Should she stumble and so not reach the gate in time? It was fascinatingly simple, but it was too simple, and it was by no means certain.

Charlotte ran her hardest, and, at some slight personal risk, succeeded in slamming the gate in the face of the brown filly, as she and her attendant squires dashed up to it. There was a great deal of slipping about and snorting, before the trio recovered themselves, and retired to pa.s.s off their discomfiture in a series of dislocating bucks and squealing snaps at each other, and then Charlotte, purple from her exertions, advanced to meet Lambert with the smile of the benefactor broad upon her face. His was blotched white and red with fright and running; without a breath left to thank her, he took her hand, and wrung it with a more genuine emotion than he had ever before felt for her.

Francie, meanwhile, strolled slowly up the lane towards the house, with her red parasol on her shoulder and her bunch of cowslips in her hand. She knew that the visit to the Stone Field was only the preliminary to a crawling inspection of every cow, sheep, and potato ridge on the farm, and she remembered that she had seen a novel of attractive aspect on the table in the drawing-room. She felt singularly uninterested in everything; Gurthnamuckla was nothing but Tally Ho over again on a larger and rather cleaner scale; the same servants, the same cats, the same c.o.c.katoo, the same leathery pastry and tough mutton. Last summer these things had mingled themselves easily into her everyday enjoyment of life, as amusing and not unpleasant elements; now she promised herself that, no matter what Roddy said, this was the last time she would come to lunch with Charlotte.

Roddy was very good to her and all that, but there was nothing new about him either, and marriage was an awful humdrum thing after all. She looked back with something of regret to the crowded drudging household at Albatross Villa; she had at least had something to do there, and she had not been lonely; she often found herself very lonely at Rosemount. Before she reached the house she decided that she would ask Ida Fitzpatrick down to stay with her next month, and give her her return ticket, and a summer dress, and a new-her thoughts came to a startling full stop, as, round the corner of the house, she found herself face to face with Mr. Hawkins.

She had quite made up her mind that when she next saw him she would merely bow to him, but she had not reckoned on the necessities of such an encounter as this, and before she had time to collect herself she was shaking hands with him and listening to his explanation of what had brought him there.

"I met Miss Mullen after church yesterday," he said awkwardly, "and she asked me to come over this afternoon. I was just going out to look for her."

"Oh, really," said Francie, moving on towards the hall door; "she and Mr. Lambert are off in those fields there."

Hawkins stood looking irresolutely at her as she walked up to the open door that in Miss Duffy's time had been barricaded against all comers. She went in as unswervingly as if she had already forgotten his existence, and then yielding, according to his custom, to impulse, he followed her.

She had already taken up a book, and was seated in a chair by the window when he came in, and she did not even lift her eyes at his entrance. He went over to the polished centre table, and, opening a photograph book, turned over a few of the leaves noisily. There was a pause, tense on both sides as silence and self-consciousness could make it, and broken only by the happy, persistent call of the cuckoo and the infant caws of the young rooks in the elms by the gate. The photograph book was shut with a bang, and Hawkins, taking his resolution in both hands, came across the room, and stood in front of Francie.

"Look here!" he said, with a strange mixture of anger and entreaty in his voice; "how much longer is this sort of thing to go on? Are you always going to treat me in this sort of way?"

"I don't know what you mean," answered Francie, looking up at him with eyes of icy blue, and then down at her book again. Her heart was beating in leaps, but of this Hawkins was naturally not aware.

"You can't pretend not to know what I mean- this sort of rot of not speaking to me, and looking as if you had never seen me before. I told you I was sorry and all that. I don't know what more you want!"

"I don't want ever to speak to you again." She turned over a page of her book, and forced her eyes to follow its lines.

"You know that's impossible; you know you've got to speak to me again, unless you want to cut me and kick up a regular row. I don't know why you're going on like this. It's awfully unfair, and it's awfully hard lines." Since his visit to Rosemount, the conviction had been growing on him that in marrying another man she had treated him heartlessly, and he spoke with the fervour of righteous resentment.

"Oh, that comes well from you!" exclaimed Francie, dropping the book, and sitting up with all her pent-in wrath ablaze at last; "you that behaved in a way anyone else would be ashamed to think of! Telling me lies from first to last, and trying to make a fool of me-It was a good thing I didn't believe more than the half you said!"

"I told you no lie," said Hawkins, trying to stand his ground. "All I did was that I didn't answer your letters because I couldn't get out of that accursed engagement, and I didn't know what to say to you, and then the next thing I knew was that you were engaged, without a word of explanation to me or anything."

"And will you tell me what call there was for me to explain anything to you?" burst out Francie, looking, with the hot flash in her eyes, more lovely than he had ever seen her; "for all I knew of you, you were married already to your English heiress- Miss Coppers, or whatever her name is-I wonder at your impudence in daring to say things like that to me!" The lift of her head, and the splendid colour in her cheeks would have befitted an angry G.o.ddess, and it is not surprising that Hawkins did not take offence at the crudity of the expression, and thought less of the brogue in which it was uttered than of the quiver of the young voice that accused him.

"Look here," he said, for the second time, but with a new and very different inflection, "don't let us abuse each other any more. I couldn't answer your letters. I didn't know what to say, except to tell you that I was a cad and a beast, and I didn't see much good in doing that. Evidently," he added, with a bitterness that was at least half genuine, "it didn't make much difference to you whether I did or not."

She did not reply, except by a glance that was intended to express more than words could convey of her contempt for him, but somewhere in it, in spite of her, he felt a touch of reproach, and it was it that he answered as he said: "Of course if you won't believe me you won't, and it don't make much odds now whether you do or no; but I think if you knew how-" he stammered, and then went on with a rush-"how infernally I've suffered over the whole thing, you'd be rather sorry for me."

Francie shaped her lips to a thin and tremulous smile of disdain, but her hands clutched each other under the book in her lap with the effort necessay to answer him. "Oh, yes, I am sorry for you; I'd be sorry for anyone that would behave the way you did," she said, with a laugh that would have been more effective had it been steadier; "but I can't say you look as if you wanted my pity."

Hawkins turned abruptly away and walked towards the door, and then, as quickly, came back to her side.

"They're coming across the lawn now," he said; "before they come, don't you think you could forgive me-or just say you do, anyhow. I did behave like a brute, but I never thought you'd have cared. You may say the worst things about me you can think of, if you'll only tell me you forgive me." His voice broke on the last words in a way that gave them irresistible conviction.

Francie glanced out of the window, and saw her husband and Charlotte slowly approaching the house. "Oh, very well," she said proudly, without turning her head; "after all there's nothing to forgive."

CHAPTER XLV.

Lambert and Francie were both very silent as they drove away from Gurthnamuckla. He was the first to speak.

"I've asked Charlotte to come over and stay with you while I'm away next week. I find I can't get through the work in less than a fortnight, and I may be kept even longer than that, because I've got to go to Dublin."

"Asked Charlotte!" said Francie, in a tone of equal surprise and horror. "What on earth made you do that?"

"Because I didn't wish you should be left by yourself all that time."

"I think you might have spoken to me first," said Francie, with deepening resentment. "I'd twice sooner be left by myself than be bothered with that old cat."

Lambert looked quickly at her. He had come back to the house with his nerves still strained from his fright about the open gate, and his temper shaken by his financial difficulties, and the unexpected discovery of Hawkins in the drawing-room with his wife had not been soothing.

"I don't choose that you should be left by yourself," he said, in the masterful voice that had always, since her childhood, roused Francie's opposition. "You're a deal too young to be left alone, and-" with an involuntary softening of his voice-"and a deal too pretty, confound you!" He cut viciously with his whip at a long-legged greyhound of a pig that was rooting by the side of the road.