Part 8 (2/2)

She looked at Miss Hope-Drummond's spotless white gown, and wished she had not put on her Sunday terra-cotta.

”Oh, is it?”

Silence; during which Francie heard the wheels of her car grinding away down the avenue, and wished that she were on it.

”Have you been out on the lake much lately, Miss Hope-Drummond?”

Francie's wish was merely the laudable one of trying to keep the heavy ball of conversation rolling, but the question awoke a slumbering worm of discontent in her companion's well-ordered breast. Christopher was even now loosing from his moorings at the end of the park, without having so much as mentioned that he was going out; and Captain Cursiter, her own compatriot, attached-almost linked- to her by the bonds of mutual acquaintances, and her thorough knowledge of the Lincolns.h.i.+re Cursiters, had not risen to the fly that she had only yesterday thrown over him on the subject of the steam-launch.

”No; I had rather more than I cared for the last time we were out, the day of the picnic. I've had neuralgia in my face ever since that evening, we were all kept out so late.”

”Oh, my! That neuralgia's a horrid thing,” said Francie sympathetically. ”I didn't get any harm out of it with all the wetting and the knock on my head and everything. I thought it was lovely fun! But”-forgetting her shyness in the interest of the moment-”Mr. Hawkins told me that Cursiter said to him the world wouldn't get him to take out ladies in his boat again!”

Miss Hope-Drummond raised her dark eyebrows.

”Really? That is very crus.h.i.+ng of Captain Cursiter.”

Francie felt in a moment an emphasis on the word Captain; but tried to ignore her own confusion.

”It doesn't crush me, I can tell you! I wouldn't give a pin to go in his old boat. I'd twice sooner go in a yacht, upsets and all!”

”Oh!”

Miss Hope-Drummond said no more than this, but her tone was sufficient. Her eyes strayed towards the book that lay in her lap, and the finger inserted in its pages showed, as if unconsciously, a tendency to open it again.

There was another silence, during which Francie studied the dark and unintelligible oil-paintings on the expanses of wall, the flowers, arranged with such easy and careless lavishness in strange and innumerable jars and vases; and lastly, Dinah, in a distant window, catching and eating flies with disgusting avidity. She felt as if her petticoats showed her boots more than was desirable, that her gloves were of too brilliant a tint, and that she ought to have left her umbrella in the hall. At this painful stage of her reflections she heard Lady Dysart's incautious voice outside.

”It's always the way with Christopher; he digs a hole and buries himself in it whenever he's wanted. Take her out and let her eat strawberries now; and then in the afternoon-” the voice suddenly sank as if in response to an admonition, and Francie's already faint heart sank along with it. Oh, to be at the Hemphills, making toffee on the parlour fire, remote from the glories and sufferings of aristocratic houses! The next moment she was shaking hands with Pamela, and becoming gradually aware that she was in an atmosphere of ease and friendliness, much as the slow pleasure of a perfume makes itself slowly felt. The fact that Pamela had on a gra.s.s hat of sunburnt maturity, and a skirt which bore the imprint of dogs' paws was in itself rea.s.suring, and as they went together down a shrubbery walk, and finally settled upon the strawberry beds in the wide, fragrant kitchen-garden, the first terrors began to subside in Francie's trembling soul, and she found herself breathing more naturally in this strange, rarefied condition of things. Even luncheon was less formidable than she had expected. Christopher was not there, the dreaded Sir Benjamin was not there, and Lady Dysart consulted her about the cutting-out of poor clothes, and accepted with an almost alarming enthusiasm the suggestions that Francie diffidently brought up from the depths of past experience of the Fitzpatrick wardrobe.

The long, unusual leisure of the afternoon pa.s.sed by her like a pleasant dream, in which, as she sat in a basket-chair under the verandah outside the drawing-room windows, ill.u.s.trated papers, American magazines, the snoring lethargy of the dogs, and the warm life and stillness of the air were about equally blended. Miss Hope-Drummond lay aloof in a hammock under a horse-chestnut tree at the end of the flower-garden, working at the strip of Russian embroidery that some day was to languish neglected on the stall of an English bazaar; Francie had seen her trail forth with her arms full of cus.h.i.+ons, and dimly divined that her fellow-guest was hardly tolerating the hours that were to her like fragments collected from all the holidays she had ever known. No wonder, she thought, that Pamela wore a brow of such serenity, when days like this were her ordinary portion. Five o'clock came, and with it, with the majestic punctuality of a heavenly body, came Gorman and the tea equipage, attended by his satellite, William, bearing the tea-table. Francie had never heard the word idyllic, but the feeling that it generally conveys came to her as she lay back in her chair, and saw the roses swaying about the pillars of the verandah, and watched the clots of cream sliding into her cup over the broad lip of the cream jug, and thought how incredibly brilliant the silver was, and that Miss Dysart's hands looked awfully pretty while she was pouring out tea, and weren't a bit spoiled by being rather brown. It was consolatory that Miss Hope-Drummond had elected to have her tea conveyed to her in the hammock; it was too much trouble to get out of it, she called, in her shrill, languid voice, and no one had argued the matter with her. Lady Dysart, who had occupied herself during the afternoon in visiting the garden-beds and giving a species of clinical lecture on each to the wholly unimpressed gardener, had subsided into a chair beside Francie, and began to discuss with her the evangelical preachers of Dublin, a mark of confidence and esteem which Pamela noticed with astonishment. Francie had got to her second cup of tea, and had evinced an edifying familiarity with Lady Dysart's most chosen divines, when the dogs, who had been seated opposite Pamela, following with lambent eyes the pa.s.sage of each morsel to her lips, rushed from the verandah, and charged with furious barkings across the garden and down the lawn towards two figures, whom in their hearts they knew to be the sons of the house, but whom, for histrionic purposes, they affected to regard as dangerous strangers.

Miss Hope-Drummond sat up in her hammock and pinned her hat on straight.

”Mr. Dysart,” she called, as Christopher and Garry neared her chestnut tree, ”you've just come in time to get me another cup of tea.”

Christopher dived under the chestnut branches, and presently, with what Miss Hope-Drummond felt to be unexampled stupidity, returned with it, but without his own. He had even the gaucherie to commend her choice of the hammock, and having done so, to turn and walk back to the verandah, and Miss Hope-Drummond asked herself for the hundredth time how the Castlemores could have put up with him.

”I met the soldiers out on the lake to-day,” Christopher remarked as he sat down; ”I told them to come and dine to-morrow.” He looked at Pamela with an eye that challenged her grat.i.tude, but before she could reply, Garry interposed in tones m.u.f.fled by cake.

”He did, the beast; and he might have remembered it was my birthday, and the charades and everything.”

”Oh, Garry, must we have charades?” said Pamela lamentably.

”Well, of course we must, you fool,” returned Garry with scriptural directness; ”I've told all the men about the place, and Kitty Gascogne's coming to act, and James Canavan's going to put papa to bed early and help us-” Garry's voice sank to the fluent complaining undertone that distinguishes a small boy with a grievance, and Christopher turned to his mother's guest.

”I suppose you've acted in charades, Miss Fitzpatrick?”

”Is it me act? Oh goodness, no, Mr. Dysart! I never did such a thing but once, when I had to read Lady Macbeth's part at school, and I thought I'd die laughing the whole time.”

Pamela and Lady Dysart exchanged glances as they laughed at this reminiscence. Would Christopher ever talk to a girl with a voice like this? was the interpretation of Pamela's glance, while Lady Dysart's was a mere note of admiration for the way that the sunlight caught the curls on Francie's forehead as she sat up to speak to Christopher, and for the colour that had risen in her cheeks since his arrival, more especially since his announcement that Captain Cursiter and Mr. Hawkins were coming to dinner. There are few women who can avoid some slight change of manner and even of appearance, when a man is added to the company, and it may at once be said that Francie was far from trying to repress her increased interest on such an occasion.

”What made you think I could act, Mr. Dysart?” she said, looking at him a little self-consciously; ”do you think I look like an actress?”

The question was interrupted by a cry from the chestnut tree, and Miss Hope-Drummond's voice was heard appealing to someone to come and help her out of the hammock.

”She can get out jolly well by herself,” remarked Garry, but Christopher got up and lounged across the gra.s.s in response to the summons, and Francie's question remained unanswered. Lady Dysart rose too, and watched her son helping Miss Hope-Drummond on to her feet, and strolling away with her in the direction of the shrubbery. Then she turned to Francie.

”Now, Miss Fitzpatrick, you shall come and explain that Dorcas Society sleeve to me, and I should not be surprised if you could help me with the acrostic.”

Lady Dysart considered herself to be, before all things, a diplomatist.

CHAPTER XIX.

Dinner was over. Gorman was regaling his fellows in the servants' hall with an account of how Miss Fitzpatrick had eaten her curry with a knife and fork, and her Scotch woodc.o.c.k with a spoon, and how she had accepted every variety of wine that he had offered her, and taken only a mouthful of each, an eccentricity of which William was even now reaping the benefit in the pantry. Mrs. Brady, the cook, dared say that by all accounts it was the first time the poor child had seen a bit served the way it would be fit to put into a Christian's mouth, and, indeed, it was little she'd learn of behaviour or dinners from Miss Mullen, except to make up messes for them dirty cats-a remark which obtained great acceptance from her audience. Mr. Gorman then gave it as his opinion that Miss Fitzpatrick was as fine a girl as you'd meet between this and Dublin, and if he was Mr. Christopher, he'd prefer her to Miss Hope-Drummond, even though the latter might be hung down with diamonds.

The object of this criticism was meantime congratulating herself that she had accomplished the last and most dreaded of the day's ceremonies, and, so far as she knew, had won through it without disaster. She certainly felt as if she never had eaten so much in her life, and she thought to herself that, taking into consideration the mental anxiety and the loss of time involved in the consumption of one of these grand dinners, she infinitely preferred the tea and poached eggs which formed her ordinary repast. Pamela was at the piano, looking a long way off in the dim pink light of the shaded room, and was playing such strange music as Francie had never heard before, and secretly hoped never to hear again. She had always believed herself to be extremely fond of music, and was wont to feel very sentimental when she and one of that tribe, whom it is to be feared she spoke of as her ”fellows,” sat on the rocks at the back of Kingstown pier and listened to the band playing ”Dorothy,” or ”The Lost Chord,” in the dark of the summer evening; but these minor murmurings, that seemed to pa.s.s by steep and painful chromatic paths from one woe to another, were to her merely exercises of varying difficulty and ugliness, in which Miss Dysart never seemed to get the chords quite right. She was too shy to get up and search for amus.e.m.e.nt among the books and papers upon a remote table, and accordingly she lay back in her chair and regarded Lady Dysart and Miss Hope-Drummond, both comfortably absorbed in conversation, and wondered whether she should ever have money enough to buy herself a tea-gown.

The door opened, and Christopher sauntered in; he looked round the room through his eye-gla.s.s, and then wandered towards the piano, where he sat down beside Pamela. Francie viewed this proceeding with less resentment than if he had been any other man in the world; she did not so much mind a neglect in which Miss Hope-Drummond was equally involved, and she was rather frightened than otherwise, when soon afterwards she saw him, in evident obedience to a hint from his sister, get up and come towards her with a large photograph-book under his arm. He sat down beside her, and, with what Pamela, watching from the distant piano, felt to be touching docility, began to expound its contents to her. He had done this thing so often before, and he knew, or thought he knew so well what people were going to say, that nothing but the unfailing proprietary interest in his own handiwork supported him on these occasions. He had not, however, turned many pages before he found that Francie's comments were by no means of the ordinary tepid and perfunctory sort. The Oxford chapels were, it is true, surveyed by her in anxious silence; but a crowd of undergraduates leaning over a bridge to look at an eight-an instantaneous photograph of a b.u.mp-race, with its running accompaniment of maniacs on the bank-Christopher's room, with Dinah sitting in his armchair with a pipe in her mouth-were all examined and discussed with fervid interest, and a cry of unfeigned excitement greeted the page on which his own photography made its debut with a deep-brown portrait of Pamela.

”Mercy on us! That's not Miss Dysart! What has she her face blackened for?”

”Oh, I did that when I did'nt know much about it last winter, and it's rather over-exposed,” answered Christopher, regarding his work of art with a lenient parental eye.

”The poor thing! And was it the cold turned her black that way?”

Christopher glanced at his companion's face to see whether this ignorance was genuine, but before he had time to offer the scientific explanation, she had pounced on a group below.

”Why, isn't that the butler? Goodness! he's the dead image of the Roman Emperors in Mangnall's questions! And who are all the other people? I declare, one of them's that queer man I saw in the hall with the old gentleman-” she stopped and stammered as she realised that she had touched on what must necessarily be a difficult subject.

”Yes, this is a photograph of the servants,” said Christopher, filling the pause with compa.s.sionate speed, ”and that's James Canavan. You'll see him to-morrow night taking a leading part in Garry's theatricals.”

”Why, d'ye tell me that man can act?”

”Act? I should think so!” he laughed as if at some recollection or other. ”He can do anything he tries, or thinks he can. He began by being a sort of hedge-schoolmaster, but he was too mad to stick to it. Anyhow, my father took him up, and put him into the agency office, and now he's his valet, and teaches Garry arithmetic when he's at home, and writes poems and plays. I envy you your first sight of James Canavan on the boards,” he ended, laughing again.

”The boards!” Francie thought to herself; ”I wonder is it like a circus?”

The photographs progressed serenely after this. Francie began to learn something of the discreetness that must be observed in inspecting amateur portrait photography, and Christopher, on his side, found he was being better entertained by Miss Mullen's cousin than he could have believed possible. They turned page after page steadily and conversationally, until Christopher made a pause of unconscious pride and affection at a group of photographs of yachts in different positions.

”These are some of the best I have,” he said; ”that's my boat, and that is Mr. Lambert's.”

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