Part 3 (2/2)
”No; I sit there because I can go to sleep.”
”Well, and do you? and who do you get to wake you?”-her quick voice treading sharply on the heels of his quiet one-”I used always to have to sit beside Uncle Robert in church to pinch him at the end of the sermon.”
”I find it very hard to wake at the end of the sermon too,” remarked Christopher, with an experimental curiosity to see what Miss Mullen's unexpected cousin would say next.
”Do y' indeed?” said Francie, flas.h.i.+ng a look at him of instant comprehension and complete sang froid. ”I'll lend the schoolmistress a hat-pin if you like! What on earth makes men so sleepy in church I don't know,” she continued; ”at our church in Dublin I used to be looking at them. All the gentlemen sit in the corner seat next the aisle, because they're the most comfortable, y' know, and from the minute the clergyman gives out the text-” she made a little gesture with her hand, showing thereby that half the b.u.t.tons were off her glove- ”they're snoring!”
How young she was, and how pretty, and how inexpressibly vulgar. Christopher thought all these things in turn, while he did what in him lay to continue the conversation in the manner expected of him. The effort was perhaps not very successful, as, after a few minutes, it was evident that Francie was losing her first freedom of discourse, and was casting about for topics more appropriate to what she had heard of Mr. Dysart's mental and literary standard.
”I hear you're a great photographer, Mr. Dysart,” she began. ”Miss Mullen says you promised to take a picture of her and her cats, and she was telling me to remind you of it. Isn't it awfully clever of you to be able to do it?”
To this form of question reply is difficult, especially when it is put with all the good faith of complete ignorance. Christopher evaded the imbecilities of direct response.
”I shall think myself awfully clever if I photograph the cats,” he said.
”Clever!” she caught him up with a little shriek of laughter. ”I can tell you you'll want to be clever! Are you able to photograph up the chimney or under Norry's bed? for that's where they always run when a man comes into the house, and if you try to stop them they'd claw the face off you! Oh, they're terrors!”
”It's very good of you to tell me all this in time,” Christopher said, with a rather absent laugh. He was listening to Miss Mullen's voice, and realising, for the first time, what it would be to live under the same roof with her and her cats; and yet this girl seemed quite light-hearted and happy. ”Perhaps, on the whole, I'd better stay away?” he said, looking at her, and feeling in the sudden causeless way in which often the soundest conclusions are arrived at, how vast was the chasm between her ideal of life and his own, and linking with the feeling a pity that would have been self-sufficient if it had not also been perfectly simple.
”Ah! don't say you won't come and take the cats!” Francie exclaimed.
They reached the Tally Ho gate as she spoke, and the others were only a step or two in front of them. Charlotte looked over her shoulder with a benign smile.
”What's this I hear about taking my cats?” she said jovially. ”You're welcome to everything in my house, Mr. Dysart, but I'll set the police on you if you take my poor cats!”
”Oh, but I a.s.sure you-”
”He's only going to photo them,” said Christopher and Francie together.
”Do you hear them, Miss Dysart?” continued Charlotte, fumbling for her latch key, ”conspiring together to rob a poor lone woman of her only live stock!”
She opened the door, and as her visitors entered the hall they caught a glance of Susan's large, stern countenance regarding them with concentrated suspicion through the rails of the staircase.
”My beauty-boy!” shouted his mistress, as he vanished upstairs. ”Steal him if you can, Mr. Dysart.”
Miss Hope-Drummond looked rather more uninterested than is usual in polite society. When she had left the hammock, slung in the shade beside the tennis-ground at Bruff, it had not been to share Mr. Corkran's hymn-book; still less had it been to walk from the church to Tally Ho between Pamela and a woman whom, from having regarded as merely outree and incomprehensible, she had now come to look upon as rather impertinent. Irish society was intolerably mixed, she decided, as she sniffed the various odours of the Tally Ho hall, and, with some sub-connection of ideas, made up her mind that photography was a detestable and silly pursuit for men. While these thoughts were pa.s.sing beneath her accurately curled fringe, Miss Mullen opened the drawing-room door, and, as they walked in, a short young man in light grey clothes arose from the most comfortable chair to greet them.
There was surprise and disfavour in Miss Mullen's eye as she extended her hand to him.
”This is an unexpected pleasure, Mr. Hawkins,” she said.
”Yes,” answered Mr. Hawkins cheerfully, taking the hand and doing his best to shake it at the height prescribed by existing fas.h.i.+on, ”I thought it would be; Miss. Fitzpatrick asked me to come in this afternoon; didn't you?” addressing himself to Francie. ”I got rather a nasty jar when I heard you were all out, but I thought I'd wait for a bit. I knew Miss Dysart always gives 'em fits at the choir practice. All the same, you know, I should have begun to eat the cake if you hadn't come in.”
The round table in the middle of the room was spread, in Louisa's accustomed fas.h.i.+on, as if for breakfast, and in the centre was placed a cake, coldly decked in the silver paper trappings that it had long worn in the grocer's window.
”'Twas well for you you didn't!” said Francie, with, as it seemed to Christopher, a most familiar and challenging laugh.
”Why?” inquired Hawkins, looking at her with a responsive eye. ”What would you have done?”
”Plenty,” returned Francie unhesitatingly; ”enough to make you sorry anyway!”
Mr. Hawkins looked delighted, and was opening his mouth for a suitable rejoinder, when Miss Mullen struck in sharply: ”Francie, go tell Louisa that I suppose she expects us to stir our tea with our fingers, for there's not a spoon on the table.”
”Oh, let me go,” said Hawkins, springing to open the door; ”I know Louisa; she was very kind to me just now. She hunted all the cats out of the room.” Francie was already in the hall, and he followed her.
The search for Louisa was lengthy, involving much calling for her by Francie, with falsetto imitations by Mr. Hawkins, and finally a pause, during which it might be presumed that the pantry was being explored. Pamela brought her chair nearer to Miss Mullen, who had begun wrathfully to stir her tea with the sugar-tongs, and entered upon a soothing line of questions as to the health and numbers of the cats; and Christopher, having cut the grocer's cake, and found that it was the usual conglomerate of tallow, saw-dust, bad eggs, and gravel, devoted himself to thick bread and b.u.t.ter, and to conversation with Miss Hope-Drummond. The period of second cups was approaching, when laughter, and a jingle of falling silver in the hall told that the search for Louisa was concluded, and Francie and Mr. Hawkins re-entered the drawing-room, the latter endeavouring, not unsuccessfully, to play the bones with four of Charlotte's best electro-plated teaspoons, while his brown boots moved in the furtive rhythm of an imaginary breakdown. Miss Mullen did not even raise her eyes, and Christopher and Miss Hope-Drummond continued their conversation unmoved; only Pamela acknowledged the histrionic intention with a sympathetic but nervous smile. Pamela's finger was always instinctively on the pulse of the person to whom she was talking, and she knew better than either Francie or Hawkins that they were in disgrace.
”I'd be obliged to you for those teaspoons, Mr. Hawkins, when you've quite done with them,” said Charlotte, with an ugly look at the chief offender's self-satisfied countenance; ”it's a good thing no one except myself takes sugar in their tea.”
”We couldn't help it,” replied Mr. Hawkins unabashed; ”Louisa was out for a walk with her young man, and Miss Fitzpatrick and I had to polish up the teaspoons ourselves.”
Charlotte received this explanation and the teaspoons in silence as she poured out the delinquents' tea; there were moments when she permitted herself the satisfaction of showing disapproval if she felt it. Francie accepted her cousin's displeasure philosophically, only betraying her sense of the situation by the expressive eye which she turned towards her companion in disgrace over the rim of her tea-cup. But Mr. Hawkins rose to the occasion. He gulped his tepid and bitter cup of tea with every appearance of enjoyment, and having arranged his small moustache with a silk handkerchief, addressed himself undauntedly to Miss Mullen.
”Do you know I don't believe you have ever been out in our tea-kettle, Miss Mullen. Captain Cursiter and I are feeling very hurt about it.”
”If you mean by 'tea-kettle' that steamboat thing that I've seen going about the lake,” replied Charlotte, making an effort to resume her first att.i.tude of suave and unruffled hospitality, and at the same time to administer needed correction to Mr. Hawkins, ”I certainly have not. I have always been taught that it was manners to wait till you're asked.”
”I quite agree with you, Miss Mullen,” struck in Pamela; ”we also thought that for a long time, but we had to give it up in the end and ask ourselves! You are much more honoured than we were.”
”Oh, I say, Miss Dysart, you know it was only our grovelling humility,” expostulated Hawkins, ”and you always said it dirtied your frock and spoiled the poetry of the lake. You quite put us off taking anybody out. But we've pulled ourselves together now, Miss Mullen, and if you and Miss Fitzpatrick will fix an afternoon to go down the lake, perhaps if Miss Dysart says she's sorry we'll let her come too, and even, if she's very good, bring whoever she likes with her.”
Mr. Hawkins' manner towards ladies had precisely that tone of self-complacent gallantry that Lady Dysart felt to be so signally lacking in her own son, and it was not without its effect even upon Charlotte. It is possible had she been aware that this special compliment to her had been arranged during the polis.h.i.+ng of the teaspoons, it might have lost some of its value; but the thought of steaming forth with the Bruff party and ”th' officers,” under the very noses of the Lismoyle matrons, was the only point of view that presented itself to her.
”Well, I'll give you no answer till I get Mr. Dysart's opinion. He's the only one of you that knows the lake,” she said more graciously. ”If you say the steamboat is safe, Mr. Dysart, and you'll come and see we're not drowned by these harum-scarum soldiers, I've no objection to going.”
Further discussion was interrupted by a rush and a scurry on the gravel of the garden path, and a flying ball of fur dashed up the outside of the window, the upper half of which was open, and suddenly realising its safety, poised itself on the sash, and crooned and spat with a collected fury at Mr. Hawkins' bull terrier, who leaped unavailingly below.
”Oh! me poor darling Bruffy!” screamed Miss Mullen, springing up and upsetting her cup of tea; ”she'll be killed! Call off your dog, Mr. Hawkins!”
As if in answer to her call, a tall figure darkened the window, and Mr. Lambert pushed Mrs. Bruff into the room with the handle of his walking-stick.
”Hullo, Charlotte! Isn't that Hawkins' dog?” he began, putting his head in at the window, then, with a sudden change of manner as he caught sight of Miss Mullen's guests, ”oh-I had no idea you had anyone here,” he said, taking off his hat to as much of Pamela and Miss Hope-Drummond as was not hidden by Charlotte's bulky person, ”I only thought I'd call round and see if Francie would like to come out for a row before dinner.”
CHAPTER X.
Washerwomen do not, as a rule, a.s.similate the principles of their trade. In Lismoyle, the row of cottages most affected by ladies of that profession was, indeed, planted by the side of the lake, but except in winter, when the floods sent a muddy wash in at the kitchen doors of Ferry Row, the customers' linen alone had any experience of its waters. The clouds of steam from the cauldrons of boiling clothes ascended from morning till night, and hung in beads upon the sooty cobwebs that draped the rafters; the food and wearing apparel of the laundresses and their vast families mingled horribly with their professional apparatus, and, outside in the road, the filthy children played among puddles that stagnated under an iridescent sc.u.m of soap-suds. A narrow strip of goose-nibbled gra.s.s divided the road from the lake sh.o.r.e, and at almost any hour of the day there might be seen a slatternly woman or two kneeling by the water's edge, pounding the wet linen on a rock with a flat wooden weapon, according to the immemorial custom of their savage cla.s.s.
The Row ended at the ferry pier, and perhaps one reason for the absence of self-respect in the appearance of its inhabitants lay in the fact that the only pa.s.sers-by were the country people on their way to the ferry, which here, where the lake narrowed to something less than a mile, was the route to the Lismoyle market generally used by the dwellers on the opposite side. The coming of a donkey-cart down the Row was an event to be celebrated with hooting and stone-throwing by the children, and, therefore, it can be understood that when, on a certain still, sleepy afternoon Miss Mullen drove slowly in her phaeton along the line of houses, she created nearly as great a sensation as she would have made in Piccadilly.
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