The Real Charlotte Part 5

"Oh, I'm dead!" she panted. "Oh, the horrible thing! What good were you that you let it go?" unworthily attacking the equally exhausted Corkran. Then, in tones of consternation, "Goodness! Look at Mr. Lambert and Charlotte! Oh, Mr. Lambert," as Lambert came up to her, "did you see the toss I got? The dirty thing ran away with me down the hill, and Mr. Corkran was so tired running he had to let go, and I declare I thought I was killed-and you don't look a bit sorry for me!"

"Well, what business had you to get up on a thing like that?" answered Lambert, looking angrily at the curate. "I wonder, Corkran, you hadn't more sense than to let a lady ride that machine."

"Well, indeed, Mr. Lambert, I told Miss Fitzpatrick it wasn't as easy as she thought," replied the guilty Corkran, a callow youth from Trinity College, Dublin, who had been as wax in Francie's hands, and who now saw, with unfeigned terror, the approach of Charlotte. "I begged of her not to go outside Tally Ho, but-but-I think I'd better go back and look for my hat-" he ended abruptly, retreating into the lane just as Charlotte drew up the black horse and opened her mouth to deliver herself of her indignation.

CHAPTER XII.

The broad limestone steps at Bruff looked across the lawn to the lake, and to the south. They were flanked on either hand by stone bal.u.s.trades which began and ended in a pot of blazing scarlet geraniums, and on their topmost plateau on this brilliant Ist of July, the four Bruff dogs sat on their haunches and gazed with anxious despondency in at the open hall-door. For the last half-hour Max and Dinah, the indoor dogs, had known that an expedition was toward. They had seen Pamela put on a hat that certainly was not her garden one, and as certainly lacked the veil that betokened the abhorred ceremony of church-going. They knew this hat well, and at the worst it usually meant a choir practice; but taken in connection with a blue serge skirt and the packing of a luncheon basket, they almost ventured to hope it portended a picnic on the lake. They adored picnics. In the first place, the outdoor dogs were always left at home, which alone would have imparted a delicious flavour to any entertainment, and in the second, all dietary rules were remitted for the occasion, and they were permitted to raven unchecked upon chicken bones, fat slices of ham, and luscious leavings of cream when the packing-up time came. There was, however, mingled with this enchanting prospect, the fear that they might be left behind, and from the sounding of the first note of preparation they had never let Pamela out of their sight. Whenever her step was heard through the long pa.s.sages there had gone with it the scurrying gallop of the two little waiters on providence, and when her arrangements had culminated in the luncheon basket their agitation had become so poignant that a growling game of play under the table, got up merely to pa.s.s the time, turned into an acrimonious squabble, and caused their ejection to the hall-door steps by Lady Dysart. Now, sitting outside the door, they listened with trembling to the discussion that was going on in the hall, and with the self-consciousness of dogs were convinced that it was all about themselves.

"No, I cannot allow Garry to go," declaimed Lady Dysart, her eyes raised to the ceiling as if to show her remoteness from all human entreaty; "he is not over the whooping-cough; I heard him whooping this morning in his bedroom."

The person mentioned ceased from a game of fives with a tennis-ball that threatened momentarily to break the windows, and said indignantly, "Oh, I say, mother, that was only the men in the yard pumping. That old pump makes a row just like whooping-cough."

Lady Dysart faltered for a moment before this ingenious falsehood, but soon recovered herself.

"I don't care whether it was you or the pump that whooped, it does not alter the fact of your superfluity at a picnic."

"I think Captain Cursiter and Mr. Hawkins wanted him to stoke," said Pamela from the luncheon basket.

"I have no doubt they do, but they shall not have him," said Lady Dysart with the blandness of entire decision, though her eyes wavered from her daughter's face to her son's; "they're very glad indeed to save their own clothes and spoil his."

"Well, then, I'll go with Lambert," said Garry rebelliously.

"You will do nothing of the sort!" exclaimed Lady Dysart, "Whatever I may do about allowing you to go with Captain Cursiter, nothing shall induce me to sanction any plan that involves your going in that most dangerous yacht. Christopher himself says she is over-sparred." Lady Dysart had no idea of the meaning of the accusation, but she felt the term to be good and telling. "Now, Pamela, will you promise me to stay with Captain Cursiter all the time?"

"Oh, yes, I will," said Pamela laughing; "but you know in your heart that he would much rather have Garry."

"I don't care what my heart knows," replied Lady Dysart magnificently, "I know what my mouth says, and that is that you must neither of you stir out of the steam-launch."

At this descent of his mother into the pit so artfully digged for her, Garry withdrew to attire himself for the position of stoker, and Pamela discreetly changed the conversation.

It seemed a long time to Max and Dinah before their fate was decided, but after some last moments of anguish on the pier they found themselves, the one coiled determinedly on Pamela's lap, and the other smirking in the bow in Garry's arms, as Mr. Hawkins sculled the second relay of the Bruff party out to the launch. The first relay, consisting of Christopher and Miss Hope-Drummond, was already on its way down the lake in Mr. Lambert's 5-ton boat, with every inch of canvas set to catch the light and s.h.i.+fty breeze that blew petulantly down from the mountains, and ruffled the glitter of the lake with dark blue smears. The air quivered hotly over the great stones on the sh.o.r.e, drawing out the strong aromatic smell of the damp weeds and the bog-myrtle, and Lady Dysart stood on the end of the pier, and wrung her hands as she thought of Pamela's complexion.

Captain Cursiter was one of the anomalous soldiers whose happiness it is to spend as much time as possible in a boat, dressed in disreputable clothes, with hands begrimed and blistered with oil or ropes as the case may be, and steaming or sailing to nowhere and back again with undying enthusiasm. He was a thin, brown man, with a moustache rather lighter in colour than the tan of his face, and his beaky nose, combined with his disposition to flee from the haunts of men, had inspired his friends to bestow on him the pet name of "Snipey." The festivity on which he was at present embarked was none of his seeking, and it had been only by strenuous argument, fortified by the artful suggestion that no one else was really competent to work the boat, that Mr. Hawkins had got him into clean flannels and the conduct of the expedition. He knew neither Miss Mullen nor Francie, and his acquaintance with the Dysarts, as with other dwellers in the neighbourhood, was of a slight and unprogressive character, and in strong contrast to the manner in which Mr. Hawkins had become at Bruff and elsewhere what that young gentleman was pleased to term "the gated infant." During the run from Lismoyle to Bruff he had been able to occupy himself with the affairs of the steam-launch; but when Hawkins, his prop and stay, had rowed ash.o.r.e for the Dysart party, the iron had entered into his soul.

As the punt neared the launch, Mr. Hawkins looked round to take his distance in bringing her alongside, and recognised with one delighted glance the set smile of suffering politeness that denoted that Captain Cursiter was making himself agreeable to the ladies. Charlotte was sitting in the stern with a depressing air of Sunday-outness about her, and a stout umbrella over her head. It was not in her nature to feel shy; the grain of it was too coa.r.s.e and strong to harbour such a thing as diffidence, but she knew well enough when she was socially unsuccessful, and she was already aware that she was going to be out of her element on this expedition. Lambert, who would have been a kind of connecting link, was already far in the offing. Captain Cursiter she mentally characterised as a poor stick. Hawkins, whom she had begun by liking, was daily-almost hourly-gaining in her disfavour, and from neither Pamela, Francie, or Garry did she expect much entertainment. Charlotte had a vigorous taste in conversation, and her idea of a pleasure party was not to talk to Pamela Dysart about the choir and the machinery of a school feast for an hour and a half, and from time to time to repulse with ill-a.s.sumed politeness the bird-like flights of Dinah on to her lap. Francie and Mr. Hawkins sat forward on the roof of the little cabin, and apparently entertained one another vastly, judging by their appearance and the fragments of conversation that from time to time made their way aft in the environment of a cloud of s.m.u.ts. Captain Cursiter, revelling in the well-known restrictions that encompa.s.s the man at the wheel, stood serenely aloof, steering among the hump-backed green islands and treacherous shallows, and thinking to himself that Hawkins was going ahead pretty fast with that Dublin girl.

Mr. Hawkins had been for some time a source of anxiety to his brother officers, who disapproved of matrimony for the young of their regiment. Things had looked so serious when he was quartered at Limerick that he had been hurriedly sent on detachment to Lismoyle before he had time to "make an example of himself," as one of the most unmarried of the majors observed, and into Captain Cursiter's trusted hands he had been committed, with urgent instructions to keep an eye on him. Cursiter's eye was renowned for its blighting qualities on occasions such as these, and his jibes at matrimony were looked on by his brother officers as the most finished and scathing expressions of proper feeling on the subject that could be desired; but it was agreed that he would have his hands full.

The launch slid smoothly along with a low clicking of the machinery, cutting her way across the reflections of the mountains in pursuit of the tall, white sail of the Daphne, that seemed each moment to grow taller, as the yacht was steadily overhauled by her more practical comrade. The lake was narrower here, where it neared the end of its twenty-mile span, and so calm that the sheep and cattle grazing on the brown mountains were reflected in its depths, and the yacht seemed as incongruous in the midst of them as the ark on Mount Ararat. The last bend of the lake was before them; the Daphne crept round it, moved mysteriously by a wind that was imperceptible to the baking company on the steam-launch, and by the time the latter had churned her way round the fir-clad point, the yacht was letting go her anchor near the landing-place of a large wooded island.

At a picnic nothing is of much account before luncheon, and the gloom of hunger hung like a pall over the party that took ash.o.r.e luncheon baskets, unpacked knives and forks, and gathered stones to put on the corners of the table-cloth. But such a hunger is Nature's salve for the inadequacy of human beings to amuse themselves; the body comes to the relief of the mind with the compa.s.sionate superiority of a good servant, and confers inward festivity upon many a dull dinner party. Max and Dinah were quite of this opinion. They had behaved with commendable fort.i.tude during the voyage, though in the earlier part of it a shuddering dejection on Max's part had seemed to Pamela's trained eye to forbode sea-sickness, but at the lifting of the luncheon basket into the punt their self-control deserted them. The succulent trail left upon the air, palpable to the dognose as the smoke of the steam-launch to the human eye, beguiled them into efforts to follow, which were only suppressed by their being secretly immured in the cabin by Garry. No one but he saw the two wan faces that yearned at the tiny cabin windows, as the last punt load left for the land, and when at last the wails of the captives streamed across the water, anyone but Garry would have repented of the cruelty. The dogs will never forget it to Captain Cursiter that it was he who rowed out to the launch and brought them ash.o.r.e to enjoy their fair share of the picnic, and their grat.i.tude will never be tempered by the knowledge that he had caught at the excuse to escape from the conversation which Miss Hope-Drummond, notwithstanding even the pangs of hunger, was proffering to him.

There is something unavoidably vulgar in the aspect of a picnic party when engaged in the culminating rite of eating on the gra.s.s. They may feel themselves to be picturesque, gipsy-like, even romantic, but to the unpartic.i.p.ating looker-on, not even the gilded dignity of champagne can redeem them from being a mere group of greedy, huddled backs, with ugly tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs of paper, dirty plates, and empty bottles. But at Innishochery the only pa.s.sers-by were straight-flying wild-duck or wood-pigeons, or an occasional sea-gull lounging up from the distant Atlantic, all observant enough in their way, but not critical. It is probable they did not notice even the singular ungracefulness of Miss Mullen's att.i.tude, as she sat with her short legs uncomfortably tucked away, and her large jaws moving steadily as she indemnified herself for the stupidity of the recent trip. The champagne at length had its usual beneficent effect upon the conversation. Charlotte began to tell stories about her cats and her servants to Christopher and Pamela, with admirable dramatic effect and a sense of humour that made her almost attractive. Miss Hope-Drummond had discovered that Cursiter was one of the Lincolns.h.i.+re Cursiters, and, with mutual friends as stepping-stones, was working her way on with much ability; and Francie was sitting on a mossy rock, a little away from the table-cloth, with a plate of cherry-pie on her lap, Mr. Hawkins at her feet, and unlimited opportunities for practical jestings with the cherry-stones. Garry and the dogs were engaged in sc.r.a.ping out dishes and polis.h.i.+ng plates in a silence more eloquent than words; Lambert alone, of all the party, remained impervious to the influences of luncheon, and lay on his side with his eyes moodily fixed upon his plate, only responding to Miss Mullen's frequent references to him by a sarcastic grunt.

"Now I a.s.sure you, Miss Dysart, it's perfectly true," said Charlotte, after one of these polite rejoinders. "He's too lazy to say so, but he knows right well that when I complained of my kitchen-maid to her mother, all the good I got from her was that she said, 'Would ye be agin havin' a switch and to be switchin' her!' That was a pretty way for me to spend my valuable time." Her audience laughed; and inspired by another half gla.s.s of champagne, Miss Mullen continued, "But big a fool as Bid Sal is, she's a Solon beside Donovan. He came to me th' other day and said he wanted 'little Johanna for the garden.' 'Little who?' says I; 'Little Johanna,' says he. 'Ye great, lazy fool,' says I, 'aren't ye big enough and ugly enough to do that little pick of work by yerself without wanting a girl to help ye?' And after all," said Charlotte, dropping from the tones of fury in which she had rendered her own part in the interview, "all he wanted was some guano for my early potatoes!"

Lambert got up without a smile, and sauntering down to the lake, sat down on a rock and began to smoke a cigar. He could not laugh as Christopher and even Captain Cursiter did, at Charlotte's dramatisation of her scene with her gardener. At an earlier period of his career he had found her conversation amusing, and he had not thought her vulgar. Since then he had raised himself just high enough from the sloughs of Irish middle-cla.s.s society to see its vulgarity, but he did not stand sufficiently apart from it to be able to appreciate its humorous side, and in any case he was at present little disposed to laugh at anything. He sat and smoked morosely for some time, feeling that he was making his dissatisfaction with the entertainment imposingly conspicuous; but his cigar was a failure, the rock was far from comfortable, and his bereaved friends seemed to be enjoying themselves rather more than when he left them. He threw the cigar into the water in front of him, to the consternation of a number of minnows, who had hung in the warm shallow as if listening, and now vanished in a twinkling to spread among the dark resorts of the elder fishes the tale of the thunderbolt that fell in their midst, while Lambert stalked back to the party under the trees.

Its component parts were little altered, saving that Miss Hope-Drummond had, by the ingenious erection of a parasol, isolated herself and Christopher from the others, and that Garry had joined himself to Francie and Hawkins, and was, in company with the latter, engaged in weaving stalks of gra.s.s across the insteps of Miss Fitzpatrick's open-worked stockings.

"Just look at them, Mr. Lambert," Francie called out in cheerful complaint. "They're having a race to see which of them will finish their bit of gra.s.s first, and they won't let me stir, though I'm nearly mad with the flies!"

She had a waving branch of mountain-ash in her hand; the big straw hat that she had trimmed for herself with dog-roses the night before was on the back of her head; her hair cl.u.s.tered about her white temples, and the colour that fighting the flies had brought to her face lent a lovely depth to eyes that had the gaiety and the soullessness of a child. Lambert had forgotten most of his cla.s.sics since he had left school, and it is probable that even had he remembered them it would not have occurred to him to regard anything in them as applicable to modern times. At all events Francie's Dryad-like fitness to her surroundings did not strike him, as it struck another more dispa.s.sionate onlooker, when an occasional lift of the Hope-Drummond parasol revealed the white-clad finger with its woody background to Christopher.

"It seems to me you're very well able to take care of yourself," was Lambert's reply to Miss Fitzpatrick's appeal. He turned his back upon her, and interrupted Charlotte in the middle of a story by asking her if she would walk with him across the island and have a look at the ruins of Ochery Chapel.

One habit at least of Mr. Lambert's school life remained with him. He was still a proficient at telling tales.

CHAPTER XIII.

Innishochery Island lay on the water like a great green bouquet, with a narrow grey lace edging of stony beach. From the lake it seemed that the foliage stood in a solid impenetrable ma.s.s, and that nothing but the innumerable wood-pigeons could hope to gain its inner recesses; even the s.p.a.ce of gra.s.s which, at the side of the landing-place, drove a slender wedge up among the trees, had still the moss-grown stumps upon it that told it had been recovered by force from the possession of the tall pines and thick hazel and birch scrub. The end of the wedge narrowed into a thread of a path which wound its briary way among the trees with such sinuous vagueness, and such indifference to branches overhead and rocks underfoot, that to follow it was both an act of faith and a penance. Near the middle of the island it was interrupted by a brook that slipped along whispering to itself through the silence of the wood, and though the path made a poor s.h.i.+ft to maintain its continuity with stepping-stones, it expired a few paces farther on in the bracken of a little glade.

It was a glade that had in some elfish way acquired an expression of extremest old age. The moss grew deep in the gra.s.s, lay deep on the rocks; stunted birch-trees encircled it with pale twisted arms h.o.a.ry with lichen, and, at the farther end of it, a grey ruined chapel, standing over the pool that was the birthplace of the stream, fulfilled the last requirement of romance. On this hot summer afternoon the glade had more than ever its air of tranced meditation upon other days and superiority to the outer world, lulled in its sovereignty of the island by the monotone of humming insects, while on the topmost stone of the chapel a magpie gabbled and cackled like a court jester. Christopher thought, as he sat by the pool smoking a cigarette, that he had done well in staying behind under the pretence of photographing the yacht from the landing-place, and thus eluding the rest of the party. He was only intermittently unsociable, but he had always had a taste for his own society, and, as he said to himself, he had been going strong all the morning, and the time had come for solitude and tobacco.

He was a young man of a reflective turn, and had artistic aspirations which, had he been of a hardier nature, would probably have taken him further than photography. But Christopher's temperament held one or two things unusual in the amateur. He had the saving, or perhaps fatal power of seeing his own handiwork with as unflattering an eye as he saw other people's. He had no confidence in anything about himself except his critical ability, and as he did not satisfy that, his tentative essays in painting died an early death. It was the same with everything else. His fastidious dislike of doing a thing indifferently was probably a form of conceit, and though it was a higher form than the common vanity whose geese are all swans, it brought about in him a kind of deadlock. His relations thought him extremely clever, on the strength of his university career and his intellectual fastidiousness, and he himself was aware that he was clever, and cared very little for the knowledge. Half the people in the world were clever nowadays, he said to himself with indolent irritability, but genius was another affair; and, having torn up his latest efforts in water-colour and verse, he bought a camera, and betook himself to the more attainable perfection of photography.

It was delightful to lie here with the delicate cigarette smoke keeping the flies at bay, and the gra.s.shoppers whirring away in the gra.s.s, like fairy sewing-machines, and with the soothing knowledge that the others had been through the glade, had presumably done the ruin thoroughly, and were now cutting their boots to pieces on the water-fretted limestone rocks as they scrambled round from the sh.o.r.e to the landing-place. This small venerable wood, and the boulders that had lain about the glade through sleepy centuries till the moss had smothered their outlines, brought to Christopher's mind the enchanted country through which King Arthur's knights rode; and he lay there mouthing to himself fragments of half-remembered verse, and wondering at the chance that had reserved for him this backwater in a day of otherwise dubious enjoyment. He even found himself piecing together a rhyme or two on his own account; but, as is often the case, inspiration was paralysed by the overwhelming fulness of the reality; the fifth line refused to express his idea, and the interruption of lyric emotion caused by the making and lighting of a fresh cigarette proved fatal to the prospects of the sonnet. He felt disgusted with himself and his own futility. When he had been at Oxford not thus had the springs of inspiration ceased to flow. He had begun to pa.s.s the period of water-colours then, but not the period when ideas are as plenty and as full of novelty as leaves in spring, and the knowledge has not yet come that they, like the leaves, are old as the world itself.

For the past three or four years the social exigencies of Government House life had not proved conducive to fervour of any kind, and now, while he was dawdling away his time at Bruff, in the uninterested expectation of another appointment, he found that he not only could not write, but that he seemed to have lost the wish to try.

"I suppose I am sinking into the usual bucolic stupor," he said to himself, as he abandoned the search for the vagrant rhyme. "If I only could read the Field, and had a more spontaneous habit of cursing, I should be an ideal country gentleman."

He crumpled into his pocket again the envelope on the back of which he had been scribbling, and told himself that it was more philosophic and more simple to enjoy things in the homely, pre-historic manner, without trying to express them elaborately for the benefit of others. He was intellectually effete, and what made his effeteness more hopeless was that he recognised it himself. "I am perfectly happy if I let myself alone," was the sum of his reflections. "They gave me a little more culture than I could hold, and it ran over the edge at first. Now I think I'm just about sufficiently up in the bottle for Lismoyle form." He tilted his straw hat over his nose, shut his eyes, and, leaning back, soon felt the delicious fusion into his brain of the surrounding hum and soft movement that tells of the coming of out-of-door summer sleep.

It is deplorable to think of what figure Christopher must cut in the eyes of those whose robuster taste demands in a young man some more potent and heroic qualities, a gentlemanly hardihood in language and liquor, an interesting suggestion of moral obliquity, or, at least, some hereditary vice on which the character may make s.h.i.+pwreck with magnificent helplessness. Christopher, with his preference for his sister's society, and his lack of interest in the majority of manly occupations, from hunting to music halls, has small claim to respect or admiration. The invertebrateness of his character seemed to be expressed in his att.i.tude, as he lay, supine, under the birch trees, with the gra.s.s making a luxurious couch for his lazy limbs, and the faint breeze just stirring about him. His sleep was not deep enough to still the breath of summer in his ears, but it had quieted the jabber of the magpie to a distant purring, and he was fast falling into the abyss of unconsciousness, when a gentle, regular sound made itself felt, the fall of a footstep and the brus.h.i.+ng of a skirt through the gra.s.s. He lay very still, and cherished an ungenial hope that the white-stemmed birches might mercifully screen him from the invader. The step came nearer, and something in its solidity and determination gave Christopher a guess as to whose it was, that was speedily made certainty by a call that jarred all the sleepy enchantment of the glade.

"Fran-cie!"

Christopher shrank lower behind a mossy stone, and wildly hoped that his unconcealable white flannels might be mistaken for the stem of a fallen birch.

"Fran-cie!"

It had come nearer, and Christopher antic.i.p.ated the inevitable discovery by getting up and speaking.

"I'm afraid she's not here, Miss Mullen. She has not been here for half an hour at least." He did not feel bound to add that when he first sat down by the pool, he had heard Miss Fitzpatrick's and Mr. Hawkins' voices in high and agreeable altercation on the opposite side of the island to that taken by the rest of the party.

The asperity that had been discernible in Miss Mullen's summons to her cousin vanished at once.

"My goodness me! Mr. Dysart! To think of your being here all the time, 'Far from the madding crowd's ign.o.ble strife!' Here I am hunting for that naughty girl to tell her to come and help to make tea, instead of letting your poor sister have all the trouble by herself."

Charlotte was rather out of breath, and looked hot and annoyed, in spite of the smile with which she lubricated her remark.

"Oh, my sister is used to that sort of thing," said Christopher, "and Miss Hope-Drummond is there to help, isn't she?"

Charlotte had seated herself on a rock, and was fanning herself with her pocket-handkerchief; evidently going to make herself agreeable, Christopher thought, with an irritability that lost no detail of her hand's ungainly action.

"I don't think Miss Hope-Drummond is much in the utilitarian line," she said, with a laugh that was as slighting as she dared to make it. "Hers is the purely ornamental, I should imagine. Now, I will say for poor Francie, if she was there, no one would work harder than she would, and, though I say it that shouldn't, I think she's ornamental too."

"Oh, highly ornamental," said Christopher politely. "I don't think there can be any doubt about that."

"You're very good to say so," replied Charlotte effusively; "but I can tell you, Mr. Dysart, that poor child has had to make herself useful as well as ornamental before now. From what she tells me I suspect there were few things she didn't have to put her hand to before she came down to me here."

"Really!" said Christopher, as politely as before, "that was very hard luck."

"You may say that it was!" returned Charlotte, planting a hand on each knee with elbows squared outwards, as was her wont in moments of excitement, and taking up her parable against the Fitzpatricks with all the enthusiasm of a near relation. "Her uncle and aunt are very good people in their way, I suppose, but beyond feeding her and putting clothes on her back, I don't know what they did for her."

Charlotte had begun her sentence with comparative calm, but she had gathered heat and velocity as she proceeded. She paused with a snort, and Christopher, who had never before been privileged to behold her in her intenser moments, said, without a very distinct idea of what was expected of him: "Oh, really, and who are these amiable people?"

"Fitzpatricks!" spluttered Miss Mullen, "and no better than the dirt under my poor cousin Isabella Mullen's feet. It's through her Francie's related to me, and not through the Fitzpatricks at all. I'm no relation of the Fitzpatricks, thank G.o.d! My father's brother married a Butler, and Francie's grandmother was a Butler too-"

"It's very intricate," murmured Christopher; "it sounds as if she ought to have been a parlour-maid."

"And that's the only connection I am of the Fitzpatricks," continued Miss Mullen at lightning speed, oblivious of interruption; "but Francie takes after her mother's family and her grandmother's family, and your poor father would tell you if he was able, that the Butlers of Tally Ho were as well known in their time as the Dysarts of Bruff!"

"I'm sure he would," said Christopher feebly, thinking as he spoke that his conversations with his father had been wont to treat of more stirring and personal topics than the bygone glories of the Butlers.

"Yes, indeed, as good a family as any in the county. People laugh at me, and say I'm mad about family and pedigree; but I declare to goodness, Mr. Dysart, I think the French are right when they say, 'bong song ne poo mongtir,' and there's nothing like good blood after all."

Charlotte possessed the happy quality of believing in the purity of her own French accent, and she felt a great satisfaction in rounding her peroration with a quotation in that tongue. She had, moreover, worked off some of the irritation which had, from various causes, been seething within her when she met Christopher; and when she resumed her discourse it was in the voice of the orator, who, having ranted out one branch of his subject, enters upon the next with almost awful quietness.

"I don't know why I should bore you about a purely family matter, Mr. Dysart, but the truth is, it cuts me to the heart when I see your sister-your charming sister-yes, and Miss Hope-Drummond too-not that I'd mention her in the same breath with Miss Dysart-with every advantage that education can give them, and then to think of that poor girl, brought up from hand to mouth, and her little fortune that should have been spent on herself going, as I may say, to fill the stomachs of the Fitzpatricks' brood!"

Christopher raised himself from the position of leaning against a tree, in which he had listened, not without interest, to the recital of Francie's wrongs.

"I don't think you need apologise for Miss Fitzpatrick," he said, rather more coldly than he had yet spoken. He had ceased to be amused by Miss Mullen; eccentricity was one thing, but vulgar want of reserve was another; he wondered if she discussed her cousin's affairs thus openly with all his friends.

"It's very kind of you to say so," rejoined Miss Mullen eagerly," but I know very well you're not blind, any more than I am, and all my affection for the girl can't make me shut my eyes to what's unlady-like or bad style, though I know it's not her fault."

Christopher looked at his watch surrept.i.tiously.

"Now I'm delaying you in a most unwarrantable way," said Charlotte, noting and interpreting the action at once, "but I got so hot and tired running about the woods that I had to take a rest. I was trying to get a chance to say a word to your sister about Francie to ask her to be kind to her, but I daresay it'll come to the same thing now that I've had a chat with you," she concluded, rising from her seat and smiling with luscious affability.

A little below the pond two great rocks leaned towards each other, and between them a hawthorn bush had pressed itself up to the light. Something like a path was trodden round the rocks, and a few rags impaled on the spikes of the thorn bush denoted that it marked the place of a holy well. Conspicuous among these votive offerings were two white rags, new and spotless, and altogether out of keeping with the sc.r.a.ps of red flannel and dirty frieze that had been left by the faithful in lieu of visiting cards for the patron saint of the shrine. Christopher and Charlotte's way led them within a few yards of the spot; the latter's curiosity induced her, as she pa.s.sed, to examine the last contributions to the thorn bush.

"I wonder who has been tearing up their best pocket-handkerchiefs for a wish?" said Christopher, putting up his eye-gla.s.s and peering at the rags.

"Two bigger fools than the rest of them, I suppose," said Miss Mullen shortly; "we'd better hurry on now, Mr. Dysart, or we'll get no tea."

She swept Christopher in front of her along the narrow path before he had time to see that the last two pilgrims had determined that the saint should make no mistake about their ident.i.ty, and had struck upon the thorn bush the corners of their handkerchiefs, one of them, a silken triangle, having on it the initials G. H., while on the other was a large and evidently home-embroidered F.

CHAPTER XIV.

Late that afternoon, when the sun was beginning to stoop to the west, a wind came creeping down from somewhere back of the mountains, and began to stretch tentative cats' paws over the lake. It had pushed before it across the Atlantic a soft ma.s.s of orange-coloured cloud, that caught the sun's lowered rays, and spread them in a mellow glare over everything. The lake turned to a coa.r.s.e and furious blue; all the rocks and tree stems became like red gold, and the polished bra.s.s top of the funnel of the steam-launch looked as if it were on fire as Captain Cursiter turned the Serpolette's sharp snout to the wind, and steamed at full speed round Ochery Point. The yacht had started half an hour before on her tedious zig-zag journey home, and was already far down to the right, her sails all aglow as she leaned aslant like a skater, swooping and bending under the freshening breeze.

It was evident that Lambert wished to make the most of his time, for almost immediately after the Daphne had gone about with smooth precision, and had sprung away on the other tack, the party on the launch saw a flutter of white, and a top-sail was run up.

"By Jove! Lambert didn't make much on that tack," remarked Captain Cursiter to his brother-in-arms, as with an imperceptible pressure of the wheel he serenely headed the launch straight for her destination, "I don't believe he's done himself much good with that top-sail either."

Mr. Hawkins turned a sour eye upon the Daphne and said laconically, "Silly a.s.s; he'll smother her."

"Upon my word, I don't think he'll get in much before nine o'clock to-night," continued Cursiter; "it's pretty nearly dead in his teeth, and he doesn't make a hundred yards on each tack."

Mr. Hawkins slammed the lid of the coal-bunker, and stepped past his chief into the after-part of the launch.

"I say, Miss Mullen," he began with scarcely suppressed malignity, "Captain Cursiter says you won't see your niece before to-morrow morning. You'll be sorry you wouldn't let her come home in the launch after all."

"If she hadn't been so late for her tea," retorted Miss Mullen, "Mr. Lambert could have started half an hour before he did."

"Half an hour will be neither here nor there in this game. What Lambert ought to have done was to have started after luncheon, but I think I may remind you, Miss Mullen, that you took him off to the holy well then."

"Well, and if I did, I didn't leave my best pocket handkerchief hanging in rags on the thorn-bush, like some other people I know of!" Miss Mullen felt that she had scored, and looked for sympathy to Pamela, who, having as was usual with her, borne the heat and burden of the day in the matter of packings and was.h.i.+ngs-up, was now sitting, pale and tired, in the stern, with Dinah solidly implanted in her lap, and Max huddled miserably on the seat beside her. Miss Hope-Drummond, shrouded in silence and a long plaid cloak, paid no attention to anyone or anything. There are few who can drink the dregs of the cup of pleasuring with any appearance of enjoyment, and Miss Hope-Drummond was not one of them. The alteration in the respective crews of the yacht and the steam-launch had been made by no wish of hers, and it is probable that but for the unexpected support that Cursiter had received from Miss Mullen, his schemes for Mr. Hawkins' welfare would not have prospered. The idea had indeed occurred to Miss Hope-Drummond that the proprietor of the launch had perhaps a personal motive in suggesting the exchange, but when she found that Captain Cursiter was going to stand with his back to her, and steer, she wished that she had not yielded her place in the Daphne to a young person whom she already thought of as "that Miss Fitzpatrick," applying in its full force the demonstrative p.r.o.noun that denotes feminine animosity more subtly and expressively than is in the power of any adjective. Hawkins she felt was out of her jurisdiction and unworthy of attention, and she politely ignored Pamela's attempts to involve her in conversation with him. Her neat brown fringe was out of curl; long strands of hair blew unbecomingly over her ears; her feet were very cold, and she finally buried herself to the nose in a fur boa that gave her the effect of a moustached and bearded Russian n.o.ble, and began, as was her custom during sermons and other periods of tedium, to elaborate the construction of a new tea-gown.

To do Mr. Hawkins justice, he, though equally ill-treated by fate, rose superior to his disappointment. After his encounter with Miss Mullen he settled confidentially down in the corner beside Pamela, and amused himself by pulling Dinah's short, fat tail, and puffing cigarette smoke in her face, while he regaled her mistress with an a.s.sortment of the innermost gossip of Lismoyle.

On board the Daphne, the aspect of things was less comfortable. Although the wind was too much in her teeth for her to make much advance for home, there was enough to drive her through the water at a pace that made the long tacks from side to side of the lake seem as nothing, and to give Francie as much as she could do to keep her big hat on her head. She was sitting up on the weather side with Lambert, who was steering; and Christopher, in the bows, was working the head sails, and acting as movable ballast when they went about. At first, while they were beating out of the narrow channel of Ochery, Francie had found it advisable to lie in a heap beneath a tarpaulin, to avoid the onslaught of the boom at each frequent tack, but now that they were out on the open lake, with the top-sail hoisted, she had risen to her present position, and, in spite of her screams as the sharp squalls came down from the mountains and lifted her hat till it stood on end like a rearing horse, was enjoying herself amazingly. Unlike Miss Hope-Drummond, she was pre-eminently one of those who come home unflagging from the most prolonged outing, and to-day's entertainment, so far from being exhausting, had verified to the utmost her belief in the charms of the British officer, as well as Miss f.a.n.n.y Hemphill's prophecies of her success in such quarters. Nevertheless she was quite content to return in the yacht; it was salutary for Mr. Hawkins to see that she could do without him very well, it took her from Charlotte's dangerous proximity, and it also gave her an opportunity of appeasing Mr. Lambert, who, as she was quite aware, was not in the best of tempers. So far her nimble tongue had of necessity been idle. Christopher's position in the bows isolated him from all conversation of the ordinary pitch, and Lambert had been at first too much occupied with the affairs of his boat to speak to her, but now, as a sharper gust nearly s.n.a.t.c.hed her hat from her restraining hand, he turned to her.

"If it wasn't that you seem to enjoy having that hat blown inside out every second minute," he said chillingly, "I'd offer to lend you a cap."

"What sort is it?" demanded Francie. "If it's anything like that old deerstalker thing you have on your head now, I wouldn't touch it with the tongs!"

Lambert's only reply was to grope under the seat with one hand, and to bring out a red knitted cap of the conventional sailoring type, which he handed to Francie without so much as looking at her. Miss Fitzpatrick recognised its merits with half a glance, and, promptly putting it on her head, stuffed the chef d'aeuvre of the night before under the seat among the deck-swabs and ends of rope that lurked there. Christopher, looking aft at the moment, saw the change of head-gear, and it was, perhaps, characteristic of him that even while he acknowledged the appropriateness of the red cap of liberty to the impertinence of the brilliant face beneath it, he found himself reminded of the extra supplement, in colours, of any Christmas number- indubitably pretty but a trifle vulgar.

In the meantime the object of this patronising criticism, feeling herself now able to give her undivided attention to conversation, regarded Mr. Lambert's sulky face with open amus.e.m.e.nt, and said: "Well, now, tell me what made you so cross all day. Was it because Mrs. Lambert wasn't out?"

Lambert looked at her for an instant without speaking. "Ready about," he called out. "Mind your head! Lee helm!"

The little yacht hung and staggered for a moment, and then, with a diving plunge, started forward, with every sail full and straining. Francie scrambled with some difficulty to the other side of the tiny c.o.c.kpit, and climbed up on to the seat by Mr. Lambert, just in time to see a very fair imitation of a wave break on the weather bow and splash a sparkling shower into Christopher's face.

"Oh, Mr. Dysart! are you drowned?" she screamed ecstatically.