The Real Charlotte Part 18

Like the last letter she had had from him, this had come early in the morning, but on this occasion she could not go up to her room to read it in peace. The apartment that she shared with Ida and Mabel offered few facilities for repose, and none for seclusion, and, besides, there was too much to be done in the way of helping to lay the table and get the breakfast. She hurried about the kitchen in her shabby gown, putting the kettle on to a hotter corner of the range, pouring treacle into a jampot, and filling the sugar-basin from a paper bag with quick, trembling fingers; her breath came pantingly, and the letter that she had hidden inside the front of her dress crackled with the angry rise and fall of her breast. That he should advise her to go and make friends with Charlotte, and tell her she had made a mistake in refusing Mr. Dysart, and never say a word about all that she had said to him in her letter-!

"Francie's got a letter from her sweetheart!" said Mabel, skipping round the kitchen, and singing the words in a kind of chant. "Ask her for the lovely crest for your alb.u.m, Bobby!"

Evidently the ubiquitous Mabel had studied the contents of the letter-box.

"Ah, it's well to be her," said Bridget, joining in the conversation with her accustomed ease; "it's long before my fella would write me a letter!"

"And it's little you want letters from him," remarked Bobby, in his slow, hideous, Dublin brogue, "when you're out in the lane talking to another fella every night."

"Ye lie!" said Bridget, with a flattered giggle, while Bobby ran up the kitchen stairs after Francie, and took advantage of her having the teapot in one hand and the milk-jug in the other to thrust his treacley fingers into her pocket in search of the letter.

"Ah, have done!" said Francie angrily; "look, you're after making me spill the milk!"

But Bobby, who had been joined by Mabel, continued his persecutions, till his cousin, freeing herself of her burdens, turned upon him and boxed his ears with a vigour that sent him howling upstairs to complain to his mother.

After this incident, Francie's life at Albatross Villa went on, as it seemed to her, in a squalid monotony of hopelessness. The days became darker and colder, and the food and firing more perceptibly insufficient, and strong tea a more prominent feature of each meal, and even Aunt Tish lifted her head from the round of unending, dingy cares, and saw some change in Francie. She said to Uncle Robert, with an excusable thought of Francie's ungrudging help in the household, and her contribution to it of five s.h.i.+llings a week, that it would be a pity if the sea air didn't suit the girl; and Uncle Robert, arranging a greasy satin tie under his beard at the looking-gla.s.s, preparatory to catching the 8.30 train for Dublin, had replied that it wasn't his fault if it didn't, and if she chose to be fool enough to fight with Charlotte Mullen she'd have to put up with it. Uncle Robert was a saturnine little man of small abilities, whose reverses had not improved his temper, and he felt that things were coming to a pretty pa.s.s if his wife was going to make him responsible for the sea air, as well as the smoky kitchen chimney, and the scullery sink that Bobby had choked with a dead jelly fish, and everything else.

The only events that Francie felt to be at all noteworthy were her letters from Mr. Lambert. He was not a brilliant letter writer, having neither originality, nor the gift which is sometimes bestowed on unoriginal people, of conveying news in a simple and satisfying manner; but his awkward and sterile sentences were as cold waters to the thirsty soul that was always straining back towards its time of abundance. She could scarcely say the word Lismoyle now without a hesitation, it was so shrined in dear and miserable remembrance, with all the fragrance of the summer embalming it in her mind, that, unselfconscious as she was, the word seemed sometimes too difficult to p.r.o.nounce. Lambert himself had become a personage of a greater world, and had acquired an importance that he would have resented had he known how wholly impersonal it was. In some ways she did not like him quite as much as in the Dublin days, when he had had the advantage of being the nearest thing to a gentleman that she had met with; perhaps her glimpses of his home life and the fact of his friends.h.i.+p with Charlotte had been disillusioning, or perhaps the comparison of him with other and newer figures upon her horizon had not been to his advantage; certainly it was more by virtue of his position in that other world that he was great.

It was strange that in these comparisons it was to Christopher that she turned for a standard. For her there was no flaw in Hawkins; her angry heart could name no fault in him except that he had wounded it; but she illogically felt Christopher's superiority without being aware of deficiency in the other. She did not understand Christopher; she had hardly understood him at that moment to which she now looked back with a gratified vanity that was tempered by uncertainty and not unmingled with awe; but she knew him just well enough, and had just enough perception to respect him. f.a.n.n.y Hemphill and Delia Whitty would have regarded him with a terror that would have kept them dumb in his presence, but for which they would have compensated themselves at other times by explosive gigglings at his lack of all that they admired most in young men. Some errant streak of finer sense made her feel his difference from the men she knew, without wanting to laugh at it; as has already been said, she respected him, an emotion not hitherto awakened by a varied experience of "gentlemen friends."

There were times when the domestic affairs of Albatross Villa touched their highest possibility of discomfort, when Bridget had gone to the christening of a friend's child at Enniskerry, and returned next day only partially recovered from the potations that had celebrated the event; or when Dottie, unfailing purveyor of diseases to the family, had imported German measles from her school. At these times Francie, as she made fires, or beds, or hot drinks, would think of Bruff and its servants with a regret that was none the less burning for its ign.o.bleness. Several times when she lay awake at night, staring at the blank of her own future, while the stabs of misery were sharp and unescapable, she had thought that she would write to Christopher, and tell him what had happened, and where she was. In those hours when nothing is impossible and nothing is unnatural, his face and his words, when she saw him last, took on their fullest meaning, and she felt as if she had only to put her hand out to open that which she had closed. The diplomatic letter, about nothing in particular, that should make Christopher understand that she would like to see him again, was often half composed, had indeed often lulled her sore heart and hot eyes to sleep with visions of the divers luxuries and glories that this single stepping-stone should lead to. But in the morning, when the children had gone to school, and she had come in from marketing, it was not such an easy thing to sit down and write a letter about nothing in particular to Mr. Dysart. Her defeat at the hands of Hawkins had taken away her belief in herself. She could not even hint to Christopher the true version of her fight with Charlotte, sure though she was that an untrue one had already found its way to Bruff; she could not tell him that Bridget had got drunk, and that b.u.t.ter was so dear they had to do without it; such emergencies did not somehow come within the scope of her promise to trust him, and, besides, there was the serious possibility of his volunteering to see her. She would have given a good deal to see him, but not at Albatross Villa. She pictured him to herself, seated in the midst of the Fitzpatrick family, with Ida making eyes at him from under her fringe, and Bridget scuffling audibly with Bobby outside the door. Tally Ho was a palace compared with this, and yet she remembered what she had felt when she came back to Tally Ho from Bruff. When she thought of it all, she wondered whether she could bring herself to write to Charlotte, and try to make friends with her again. It would be dreadful to do, but her life at Albatross Villa was dreadful, and the dream of another visit to Lismoyle, when she could revenge herself on Hawkins by showing him his unimportance to her, was almost too strong for her pride. How much of it was due to her thirst to see him again at any price, and how much to a pitiful hankering after the flesh pots of Egypt, it is hard to say; but November and December dragged by, and she did not write to Christopher or Charlotte, and Lambert remained her only correspondent at Lismoyle.

It was a damp, dark December, with rain and wind nearly every day. Bray Head was rarely without a cap of grey cloud, and a restless pack of waves mouthing and leaping at its foot. The Esplanade was a mile-long vista of soaked gra.s.s and glistening asphalte, whereon the foot of man apparently never trod; once or twice a storm had charged in from the south-east, and had hurled sheets of spray and big stones on to it, and pounded holes in the concrete of its sea-wall. There had been such a storm the week before Christmas. The breakers had rushed upon the long beach with "a broad-flung, s.h.i.+pwrecking roar," and the windows of the houses along the Esplanade were dimmed with salt and sand. The rain had come in under the hall door at Albatross Villa, the cowl was blown off the kitchen chimney, causing the smoke to make its exit through the house by various routes, and, worst of all, Dottie and the boys had not been out of the house for two days. Christmas morning was signalised by the heaviest downpour of the week. It was hopeless to think of going to church, least of all for a person whose most presentable boots were relics of the past summer, and bore the cuts of lake rocks on their dulled patent leather. The post came late, after its wont, but it did not bring the letter that Francie had not been able to help expecting. There had been a few Christmas cards, and one letter which did indeed bear the Lismoyle post-mark, but was only a bill from the Misses Greely, forwarded by Charlotte, for the hat that she had bought to replace the one that was lost on the day of the capsize of the Daphine.

The Christmas mid-day feast of tough roast-beef and pallid plum-pudding was eaten, and then, unexpectedly, the day brightened, a thin sunlight began to fall on the wet roads and the dirty, tossing sea, and Francie and her younger cousins went forth to take the air on the Esplanade. They were the only human beings upon it when they first got there; in any other weather Francie might have expected to meet a friend or two from Dublin there, as had occurred on previous Sundays, when the still enamoured Tommy Whitty had ridden down on his bicycle, or f.a.n.n.y Hemphill and her two medical student brothers had asked her to join them in a walk round Bray Head. The society of the Hemphills and Mr. Whitty had lost, for her, much of its pristine charm, but it was better than nothing at all; in fact, those who saw the glances that Miss Fitzpatrick, from mere force of habit, levelled at Mr. Whitty, or were witnesses of a pebble-throwing encounter with the Messrs. Hemphill, would not have guessed that she desired anything better than these amus.e.m.e.nts.

"Such a Christmas Day!" she thought to herself, "without a soul to see or to talk to! I declare, I think I'll turn nurse in an hospital, the way Susie Brennan did. They say those nurses have grand fun, and 'twould be better than this awful old place anyhow!" She had walked almost to the squat Martello tower, and while she looked discontentedly up at Bray Head, the last ray of sun struck on its dark shoulder as if to challenge her with the magnificence of its outline and the untruthfulness of her indictment. "Oh, you may s.h.i.+ne away!" she exclaimed, turning her back upon both sunlight and mountain and beginning to walk back to where Bobby and Dottie were searching for jelly-fish among the sea-weed cast up by the storm, "the day's done for now, it's as good for me to go up to the four o'clock service as be streeling about in the cold here."

Almost at the same moment the chimes from the church on the hill behind the town struck out upon the wind with beautiful severity, and obeying them listlessly, she left the children and turned up the steep suburban road that was her shortest way to Christ Church.

It was a long and stiffish pull; the wind blew her hair about till it looked like a mist of golden threads, the colour glowed dazzlingly in her cheeks, and the few men whom she pa.s.sed bestowed upon her a stare of whose purport she was we well aware. This was a cla.s.s of compliment which she neither resented not was surprised at, and it is quite possible that some months before she might have allowed her sense of it to be expressed in her face. But she felt now as if the approval of the man in the street was not worth what it used to be. It was, of course, agreeable in its way, but on this Christmas afternoon, with all its inevitable reminders of the past and the furture, it brought with it the thought of how soon her face had been forgotten by the men who had praised it most.

The gas was lighted in the church, and the service was just beginning as she pa.s.sed the decorated font and went uncertainly up a side-aisle till she was beckoned into a pew by a benevolent old lady. She knelt down in a corner, beside a pillar that was wreathed with a thick serpent of evergreens, and the old lady looked up from her admission of sin to wonder that such a pretty girl was allowed to walk through the street by herself. The heat of the chruch had brought out the aromatic smell of all the green things, the yellow gas flared from its glittering standards, and the glimmering colours of the east window were dying into darkness with the dying daylight. When she stood up for the Psalms she looked round the chruch to see if there were anyone there whom she knew; there were several familiar faces but no one with whom she had ever exchanged a word, and turning round again she devoted herself to the hopless task of finding out the special psalms that the choir were singing. Having failed in this, she felt her religious duties to be for the time suspended, and her thoughts strayed afield over things in general, sittling down finally on a subject that had become more pressing than was pleasant.

It is a truism of ancient standing that money brings no cure for heartache, but it is also true that if the money were not there the heartache would be harder to bear. Probably if Francie had returned from Lismoyle to a smart house in Merrion Square, with a carriage to drive in, and a rich relative ready to pay for new winter dresses, she would have been less miserable over Mr. Hawkins' desertion than she was at Albatross Villa; she certainly would not have felt as unhappy as she did now, standing up with the shrill singing clamouring in her ears, while she tried in different ways to answer the question of how she was to pay for the dresses that she had bought to take to Lismoyle. Twenty-five pounds a year does not go far when more than half of it is expended upon board and lodging, and a whole quarter has been antic.i.p.ated to pay for a summer visit, and Lambert's prophecy that she would find herself in the county court some day, seemed not unlikely to come true. In her pocket was a letter from a Dublin shop, containing more than a hint of legal proceedings; and even if she were able to pay them a temporising two pounds in a month, there still would remain five pounds due, and she would not have a farthing left to go on with. Everything was at its darkest for her. Her hardy, supple nature was dispirited beyond it power of reaction, and now and then the remembrance of the Sundays of last summer caught her, till the pain came in her throat, and the gaslight spread into shaking stars.

The service went on, and Francie rose and knelt mechanically with the rest of the congregation. She was not irreligious, and even the name of scepticism was scarcely understood by her, but she did not consider that religion was applicable to love affairs and bills; her mind was too young and shapeless for anything but a healthy, negligent belief in what she had been taught, and it did not enter into her head to utilise religion as a last resource, when everything else had turned out a failure. She regarded it with respect, and believed that most people grew good when they grew old, and the service pa.s.sed over her head with a vaguely pleasing effect of music and light. As she came out into the dark lofty porch a man stepped forward to meet her. Francie started violently.

"Oh, goodness gracious!" she cried, "you frightened my life out!"

But for all that, she was glad to see Mr. Lambert.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

That evening when Mrs. Fitzpatrick was putting on her best cap her long cameo ear-rings she said to her husband: "Well now, Robert, you mark words, he's after her."

"Tchah!" replied Mr. Fitzpatrick, who was not in a humour to admit that any woman could be attractive, owing to the postponement of his tea by his wife so that cakes might be baked in Mr. Lambert's honour; "you can't see a man without thinking he's in love with someone or other."

"I suppose you think it's to see yourself he's come all the way from Lismoyle," rejoined Mrs. Fitzpatrick with becoming spirit, "and says he's going to stop at Breslin's Hotel for a week."

"Oh, very well, have it your own way," said Mr. Fitzpatrick acrimoniously, "I suppose you have it all settled, and he'll be married to her by special license before the week's out."

"Well, I don't care, Robert, You wouldn't think to look at him that he'd only buried his wife four months and a half ago-though I will say he's in deep mourning -but for all that no one'd blame him that he didn't think much of that poor creature, and 'twould be a fine match for Francie if she'd take him."

"Would she take him!" echoed Mr. Fitzpatrick scornfully; "would a duck swim? I never saw the woman yet that wouldn't half hang herself to get married!"

"Ah! have done being so cross, Robert, Christmas day and all; I wonder you married at all since you think so little of women."

Finding this argument not easy to answer, Mr. Fitzpatrick said nothing, and his wife, too much interested to linger over side issues, continued, "This girls say they heard him asking her to drive to the Dargle with him to-morrow, and he's brought a grand box of sweets for the childern as a Christmas box, and six lovely pair of gloves for Francie! 'Pon me word, Icall her a very lucky girl!"

"Well, if I was a woman it isn't that fellow I'd fancy," said Mr. Fitzpatrick, unexpectedly changing his ground, "but as, thank G.o.d, I'm not, it's no affair of mine." Having delivered himself of this sentiment, Mr. Fitzpatrick went downstairs. The smell of hot cakes rose deliciously upon the air, and, as his niece emerged from the kitchen with a plateful of them in her hand, and called to him to hurry before they got cold, he thought to himself that Lambert would have the best of the bargain if he married her.

Francie found the evening surprisingly pleasant. She was, as she had always been, entirely at her ease with Mr. Lambert, and did not endure, on his account any vicarious suffering because the table-cloth was far from clean, and the fact that Bridget put on the coal with her fingers was recorded on the edges of the plates. If he chose to come and eat hot cakes in the bosom of the Fitzpatrick family instead of dining at his hotel, he was just as well able to do without a b.u.t.ter-knife as she was, and, at all events, he need not have stayed unless he killed, she thought, with a little] flash of amus.e.m.e.nt and pride that her power over him, at least, was not lost. There had been times during the last month or two when she had believed that he, like everyone else, had forgotten her, and it was agreeable to find that she had been mistaken.

The next day proved to be one of the softest and sunniest of the winter, and, as they flew along the wet road towards the Dargle, on lthe smartest of the Bray outside cars, a great revival took place in Francie's spirits. They left their car at the gate of the glen to which the Dargle river has given its name, and strolled together along the private road that runs from end to end of it. A few holiday-makers had been tempted down from Dublin by the fine day, but there was nothing that even suggested the noisy pleasure parties that vulgarise the winding beauty of the ravine on summer bank holidays.

"Doesn't it look fearfful lonely to-day?" said Francie, who had made her last visit there as a member of one of these same pleasure parties, and had enjoyed herself hightly. "You can't hear a thing but the running of the water."

They were sitting on the low parapet of the road, looking sown the brown slope of the tree-tops to the river, that was running a foaming frace among the rocks at the bottom of the cleft.

"I don't call it lonely," said Lambert, casting a discontented side-long glance at a couple walking past arm-in-arm, evidently in the silently blissful stage of courts.h.i.+p; "how many more would you like?"

"Oh, lots," replied Francie, "but I'm not going to tell you who they are!"

"I know one, anyhow," said Lambert, deliberately leading up to a topic that up to this had been only slightly touched on.

When he had walked home from the church with Francie the evening before, he had somehow not been able to talk to her consecutively; he had felt a nervous awkwardness that he had not believed himself capable of, and the fact that he was holding an umbrella over her head and that she had taken his arm had seemed the only thing that he could give his mind to.

"Who do you know?"

Francie had plucked a ribbon of hart's-tongue from the edge of the wall, and was drawing its cold satiny length across her lips.

"Wouldn't you like it now if you saw-" he paused and looked at francie-"who shall we say-Charlotte Mullen coming up the road?"

"I wouldn't care."

"Wouldn't you though! You'd run for your life, the way you did before out of Lismoyle," said Lamnbert, looking hard at her and laughing not quite genuinely.

The strip of hart's-tongue could not conceal a rising flow in the face behind it, but Francie's voice was as undaunted as ever as she replied, "Who told you I ran for my life?"

"You told me so yourslef."

"I didn't. I only told you I'd had a row with her."

"Well, that's as good as saying you had to run. You don't suppose I thought you'd get the better of Charlotte?"

"I daresay you didn't, because you're afraid of her yourself!"

There was a degree of truth in this that made Mr. Lambert suddenly realise Francie's improper levity about serious things.

"I'll tell you one thing I'm afraid of," he said severely, "and that is that you made a mistake in fighting with Charlotte. If you'd chosen to-to do as she wished, she's easy enough to get on with."

Francie flung her fern over the parapet and made no answer.

"I suppose you know she's moved into Gurthnamuckla?" he went on.

"I know nothing about anything," interrupted Francie; "I don't know how long it isn't since you wrote to me, and when you do you never tell me anything. You might be all dead and buried down there for all I know or care!"

The smallest possible glance under her eyelids tempered this statement and confused Mr. Lambert's grasp of his subject.

"Do you mean that, about not caring if I was dead or no? I daresay you do. No one cares now what happens to me."

He almost meant what he said, her exclusiveness was so exasperating, and his voice told his sincerity. Last summer she would have laughed pitilessly at his pathos, and made it up with him afterwards. But she was changed since last summer, and now as she looked at him she felt a forlorn kins.h.i.+p with him.

"Ah, what nonsense!" she said caressingly. "I'd be awfully worry if anything happened you." As if he could not help himself he took her hand, but before he could speak she had drawn it away. "Indeed, you might have been dead," she went on hurriedly,"for all you told me in your letters. Begin now and tell me the Lismoyle news. I think you said the Dysarts were away from Bruff still, didn't you?"

Lambert felt as if a hot and a cold spray of water had been turned on him alternately. "The Dysarts? Oh, yes, they've been away for some time," he said, recovering himself, "they've been in London I believe, staying with her people, since you're so anxious to know about them."

"Why wouldn't I want to know about them?" said Francie, getting off the wall. "Come on and walk a bit, it's cold sitting here."

Lambert walked on by her side rather sulkily; he was angry with himself for having let his feelings run away with him, and he was angry with Francie for pulling him up so quickly.

"Christopher Dysart's off again," he said abruptly; "he's got another of these diplomatic billets. He believed that Francie would find the information unpleasant, and he was in some contradictory way disappointed that she seemed quite unaffected by it. "He's unpaid attache to old Lord Castlemore at Copenhagen," he went on; "he started last week."

So Christopher was gone from her too, and never wrote her a line before he went. They're all the same, she thought, all they want is to spoon a girl for a bit, and if she lets them do it they get sick of her, and whatever she does they forget her the next minute. And there was Roddy Lambert trying to squeeze her hand just now, and poor Mrs. Lambert that was worth a dozen of him, not dead six months. She walked on, and forced herself to talk to him, and to make inquiries about the Bakers, Dr. Rattray, Mr. Corkran, and other lights of Lismoyle society. It was absurd, but it was none the less true that the news that Mr. Corkran was engaged to Carrie Beattie gave her an additioanl pang. The enamoured glances of the curate were fresh in her memory, and the thought that they were being now bestowed upon Carrie Beattie's freckles and watering eyes, was, though ludicrous, not altogether pleasing. She burst out laughing suddenly.

"I'm thinking of what all the Beatties will look like dressed as bridesmaids," she explained, "four of them, and every one of them roaring crying, and their noses bright red!"

The day was clouding over a little, and a damp wind began to stir among the leaves that still hung red on the beech trees. Lambert insisted with paternal determination that Francie should put on the extra coat that he was carrying for her, and the couple who had recently pa.s.sed them, and whom they had now overtaken, looked at them sympathetically, and were certain that they also were engaged. It took some time to reach the far gate of the Dargle, sauntering as they did from bend to bend of the road, and stopping occa.s.sionally to look down at the river, or up at the wooded height opposite, with conventional expressions of admiration; and by the time they had pa.s.sed down between the high evergreens at the lodge, to where the car was waiting for them, Francie had heard all that Lambert could tell her of Lismoyle news. She had also been told what a miserable life. Mr. Lambert's was, and how lonely he was at Rosemount since poor Lucy's death, and she knew how many young horses he had at gra.s.s on Gurthnamuckla, but neither mentioned the name of Mr. Hawkins.

The day of the Dargle expedition was Tuesday, and during the remainder of the weeek Mr. Lambert became so familiar a visitor at Albatross Villa, that Bridget learned to know his knock, and did not trouble herself to pull down her sleeves, or finish the mouthful of bread and tea with which she had left the kitchen, before she opened the door. Aunt Tish did not attempt to disguise her satisfaction when he was present, and rallied Francie freely in his absence; the children were quite aware of the state of affairs, having indeed discussed the matter daily with Bridget; and Uncle Robert, going gloomily up to his office in Dublin, had to admit to himself that Lambert was certainly paying her great attention, and that after all, all things considered, it would be a good thing for the girl to get a rich husband for herself when she had the chance. It was rather soon after his wife's death for a man to come courting, but of course the wedding wouldn't come off till the twelve months were up, and at the back of these reflections was the remembrance that he, Uncle Robert, was Francie's trustee, and that the security in which he had invested her five hundred pounds was becoming less sound than he could have wished.

As is proverbially the case, the princ.i.p.al persons concerned were not as aware as the lookers-on of the state of the game. Francie, to whom flirtation was as ordinary and indispensable as the breath of her nostrils, did not feel that anything much out of the common was going on, though she knew quite well that Mr. Lambert was very fond of her; and Mr. Lambert had so firmly resolved on allowing proper interval to elapse between his wife's death and that election of her successor upon which he was determined, that he looked upon the present episode as of small importance, and merely a permissible relaxation to a man whose hunting had been stopped, and who had, in a general way, been having the devil of a dull time. He was to go back to Lismoyle on Monday, the first of the year; and it was settled that he was to take Francie on Sunday afternoon to walk on kingstown pier. The social laws of Mrs. Fitzpatrick's world were not rigorous, still less was her interpretation of them; an unchaperoned expedition to Kingstown pier would not, under any circ.u.mstances, have scandalised her, and considering that Lambert was an old friend and had been married, the proceeding became almost prudishly correct. As she stood at her window and saw them turn the corner of the road on their way to the station, she observed to Mabel that there wouldn't be a handsomer couple going the pier than what they were, Francie had that stylish way with her that she always gave a nice set to a skirt, and it was wonderful the way she could trim up an old hat the same as new.

It was very bright clear afternoon, and a touch of frost in the air gave the snap and brilliancy that are often lacking in an Irish winter day. On such a Sunday Kingstown pier a.s.sumes a fair semblance of its spring and summer gaiety; the Kingstown people walk there because there is nothing else to be done at Kingstown, and the Dublin people come down to s.n.a.t.c.h what they can of sea air before the short afternoon darkens, and the hour arrives when they look out for members of the St. George's Yacht Club to take them in to tea. There was a fair sprinkling of people on the long arm of granite that curves for a mile into Dublin Bay, and as Mr. Lambert paced along it he was as agreeably conscious and his companion of the glances that met and followed their progress. It satisfied his highest ambition that the girl of his choice should be thus openly admired by men whom, year after year, he had opened up at with envious respect as they stood in the bow-window of Kildare St. Club, with figures that time was slowly shaping to its circular form, on the principle of correspondence with environment. He was a man who had always valued his possessions according to other people's estimation of them, and this afternoon Francie gained a new distinction in his eyes.

Abstract admiration, however, was one thing, but the very concrete attentions of Mr. Thomas Whitty were quite another affair. Before they had been a quarter of an hour on the pier, Francie was hailed by her Christian name, and this friend of her youth, looking more unmistakably than ever a solicitor's clerk, joined them, flushed with the effort of overtaking them, and evidently determined not to leave them again.

"I spotted you by your hair, Francie," Mr Whitty was pleased to observe, after the first greetings; "you must have been getting a new dye for it; I could see it a mile off!"

"Oh, yes," responded Francie, "I tried a new bottle the other day, the same you use for your moustache y'know! I thought I'd like people to be able to see it without a spy-gla.s.s."

As Mr. Whitty's moustache was represented by three sickly hairs and a pimple, the sarcasm was sufficiently biting to yield Lambert a short-lived gratification.

"Mr. Lambert dyes his black," continued Francie, without a change of countenance. She had the Irish love of a scrimmage in her, and she thought it would be great fun to make Mr. Lambert cross.

"D'ye find the colour comes off?" murmured Tommy Whitty, eager for revenge, but too much afraid to Lambert to speak out loud.

Even Francie, though she favoured the repartee with a giggle, was glad that Lambert had not heard.

"D'ye find you want you ears boxed?" she returned in the same tone of voice; "I won't walk with you if you don't behave." Inwardly, however, she decided that Tommy Whitty was turning into an awful cad, and felt that she would have given a good deal to have wipped out some lively pa.s.sages in her previous acquaintanced with him.

At the end of half an hour Mr. Whitty was still with them, irrepressibly intimate and full of reminiscence. Lambert, after determined efforts to talk to Francie, as if unaware of the presence of a third person, had sunk into dangerous silence, and Francie had ceased to see the amusing side of the situation, and was beginning to the exhausted by much walking to and fro. The sun set in smoky crimson behind the town, the sun-set gun banged its official recognition of the fact, followed by the wild, clear notes of a bugle, and a frosty after-glow lit up the sky, and coloured the motionless water of the harbour. A big bell boomed a monotonous summons to afternoon service, and people began to leave the pier. Those who had secured the entree of the St. George's Yacht Club proceeded comfortably thither for tea, and Lambert felt that he would have given untold sums for the right to take Francie in under the pillared portico, leaving Tommy Whitty and his seedy black coat in outer darkness. The party was gloomily tending towards the station, when the happy idea occurred to Mr. Lambert of having tea at the Marine Hotel; it might not have the distinction of the club, but it would at all events give him the power of shaking off that d.a.m.ned presuming counter-jumper, as his own mind he furiously designated Mr. Whitty.

"I'm going to take up to the hotel for tea, Francie," he said decisively, and turned at once towards the gate of the Marine gardens. "Good evening, Whitty."

The look that accompanied this valedictory remark was so conclusive that the discarded Tommy could do no more than accept the position. Francie would not come to his help, being indeed thankful to get rid of him, and he could only stand and look after the two figures, and detest Mr. Lambert, with every fibre of his little heart. The coffee-room at the hotel was warm and quiet, and Francie sank thankfully into an armchair by the fire.

"I declare this is the nicest thing I've done to-day," she said, with a sigh of tired ease; "I was dead sick of walking up and down that old pier."

This piece of truckling was almost too flagrant, and Lambert would not even look at her as he answered, "I thought you seemed to be enjoying yourself, or I'd have come away sooner."

Francie felt none of the amus.e.m.e.nt that she would once have derived from seeing Mr. Lambert in a bad temper; he had stepped into the foreground of her life and was becoming a large and serious object there, too important and powerful to be teased with any degree of pertinacity.

"Enjoy myself!" she exclaimed, "I was thinking all the time that my boots would be cut to pieces with the horrid gravel; and," she continued, laying her head on the plush-covered back of her chair, and directing a laughing, propitiatory glance at her companion, "you know I had to talk twice as much to poor Tommy because you wouldn't say a word to him. Beside, I knew him long before I knew you."

"Oh, of course if you don't mind being seen with a fellow that looks like a tailor's apprentice, I have nothing to say against it," replied Lambert, looking down on her, as he stood fingering his moustache, with one elbow on the chimney-piece. His eyes could not remain implacable when they dwelt on the face that was upturned to him, especially now, whe he felt both in face and manner something of pathos and gentleness that was as new as it was intoxicating.

If he had known what it was that had changed her he might have been differently affected by it; as it was, he put it down to the wretchedness of life at Albatross Villa, and was glad of the adversity that was making things so much easier for him. His sulkiness melted away in spite of him; it was hard to be sulky, with Francie all to himself, pouring out his tea and talking to him with an intimateness that was just tipped with flirtation; in fact, as the moments slipped by, and the thought gripped him that the next day would find him alone at Rosemount, every instant of this last afternoon in her society became unspeakably precious. The tete-e-tete across the tea-table prolonged itself so engrossingly that Lambert forgot his wonted punctuality, and their attempt to catch the five o'clock train for Bray resulted in bringing them breathless to the station as their train steamed out of it.

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII.

The Irish mail-boat was well up to time on that frosty thirty-first of December. She had crossed from Holyhead on an even keel, and when the Bailey light on the end of Howth had been sighted, the pa.s.sengers began to think that they might risk congratulations on the clemency of the weather, and some of the hardier had ordered tea in the saloon, and were drinking it with incredulous enjoyment.

"I shall go mad, Pamela, perfectly mad, if you cannot think of any word for that tenth light. C. and H.-can't you think of anything with C. and H.? I found out all the othrs in the train, and the least you might do is to think of this one for me. That dreadful woman snoring on the sofa just outside my berth put everything else out of my head."

This plaint, uttered in a deep and lamentable contralto, naturally drew some attention towards Lady Dysart, as she swept down the saloon towards the end of the table, and Pamela, becoming aware that the lady referred to was among the audience, trod upon her mother's dress and thus temprarily turned the conversation.

"C. and H.," she repeated, "I'm afraid I can't think of anything; the only word I can think of beginning with C is Christopher."

"Christopher!" cried Lady Dysart, "why, Christopher ends with an R."

As Lady Dysart for the second time p.r.o.nounced her son's name the young man who had just come below, and was having a whisky and soda at the bar at the end of the saloon, turned quickly round and put down his gla.s.s. Lady Dysart and her daughter were sitting with their backs to him, but Mr. Hawkins did not require a second glance, and made his way to them at once.

"And so you've been seeing poor Christopher off to the North Pole," he said, after the first surpirse and explanations had been got over. "I can't say I envy him. They make it quite cold enough in York-s.h.i.+re to suit me."