Part 20 (2/2)

”To the death!” interjected Mrs. Lydon fervently.

”How many wrinkles are there in the back?” said Charlotte; ”tell me the truth now, Dinny, remember 'twas only last week you were 'making your sowl' at the mission.”

”Tchah!” said Dinny Lydon contemptuously, ”it's little I regard the mission, but I wouldn't be bothered tellin' ye lies about the likes o' this,” surrept.i.tiously smoothing as he spoke a series of ridges above the hips; ”that's a grand clane back as ever I see.”

”How independent he is about his missions!” said Charlotte jibingly. ”Ha! Dinny me man, if you were sick you'd be the first to be roaring for the priest!”

”Faith, divil a roar,” returned the atheistical Dinny; ”if I couldn't knock the stone out of the gap for meself, the priest couldn't do it for me.”

”Oh, Gaad! Dinny, have conduct before Miss Mullen!” cried Mrs. Lydon.

”He may say what he likes, if he wouldn't drop candle grease on my jacket,” said Charlotte, who had taken off the coat and was critically examining every seam; ”or, indeed, Mrs. Lydon, I believe it was yourself did it!” she exclaimed, suddenly intercepting an indescribable glance of admonition from Mrs. Dinny to her husband; ”that's wax candle grease! I believe you wore it yourself at Michael M'Donagh's wake, and that's why it was finished four days ago.”

Mrs. Lydon uttered a shriek of merriment at the absurdity of the suggestion, and then fell to disclaimers so voluble as at once to convince Miss Mullen of her guilt. The accusation was not pressed home, and Dinny's undertaking to remove the grease with a hot iron was accepted with surprising amiability. Charlotte sat down on a chair whose shattered frame bore testimony to the renowned violence of Mrs. Lydon when under the influence of liquor, and encouraging the singed and half-starved cat on to her lap,she addressed herself to conversation.

”Wasn't Michael M'Donagh husband to your mother's cousin?” she said to the tailor; ”I'm told he had a very large funeral.”

”He had that,” answered Dinny, pus.h.i.+ng the black hair back from his high forehead, and looking more than ever like a Jewish rabbi; ”three priests, an' five an' twenty cars, an' fifteen pounds of althar money.”

”Well, the three priests have a right to pray their big best for him, with five pounds apiece in their pockets,” remarked Charlotte; ”I suppose it was the M'Donagh side gave the most of the altar. Those brothers of old Michael's are all stinking of money.”

”Oh, they're middlin' snug,” said Dinny, who had just enough family feeling for the M'Donaghs to make him chary of admitting their wealth; ”annyway, they're able to slap down their five s.h.i.+llins or their ten s.h.i.+llin' bit upon the althar as well as another.”

”Who got the land?” asked Charlotte, stroking the cat's filthy head, and thereby perfuming her fingers with salt fish.

”Oh, how do I know what turning and twisting of keys there was in it afther himself dyin'?” said the tailor, with the caution which his hearers understood to be a fatiguing but inevitable convention; ”they say the daughter got the biggest half, an' Shamus Bawn got the other. There's where the battle'll be between them.” He laughed sardonically, as he held up the hot iron and spat upon it to ascertain its heat.

”He'd better let his sister alone,” said Charlotte. ”Shamus Bawn has more land this minute than he has money enough to stock, with that farm he got from Mr. Lambert the other day, without trying to get more.”

”Oh, Jim's not so poor altogether that he couldn't bring the law on her if he'd like,” said Dinny, immediately resenting the slighting tone; ”he got a good lump of a furtune with the wife.”

”Ah, what's fifty pounds,” said Charlotte scornfully. ”I daresay he wanted every penny of it to pay the fine on Knocklara.”

”Arrah, fifty pounds! G.o.d help ye!” exclaimed Dinny Lydon with superior scorn. ”No, but a hundhred an' eighty was what he put down on the table to Lambert for it, and it's little but he had to give the two hundhred itself.”

Mrs. Lydon looked up from the hearth where she was squatted, fanning the fire with her red petticoat to heat another iron for her husband. ”Sure I know Dinny's safe tellin' it to a lady,” she said, rolling her dissolute cunning eye from her husband to Miss Mullen; ”but ye'll not spake of it asth.o.r.e. Jimmy had some dhrink taken when he shown Dinny the docket, because Lambert said he wouldn't give the farm so chape to e'er a one but Jimmy, an' indeed Jimmy'd break every bone in our body if he got the wind of a word that 'twas through us the neighbours had it to say he had that much money with him. Jimmy's very close in himself that way.”

Charlotte laughed good-humouredly. ”Oh, there's no fear of me, Mrs. Lydon. It's no affair of mine either way,” she said rea.s.suringly. ”Here, hurry with me jacket, Dinny, I'll be glad enough to have it on me going home.”

CHAPTER XLII.

Sir Benjamin Dysart's funeral was an event of the past. It was a full three weeks since the family vault in Lismoyle Churchyard had closed its door upon that ornament of county society; Lady Dysart's friends were beginning to recover from the strain of writing letters of condolence to her on her bereavement, and Christopher, after sacrificing to his departed parent's memory a week of perfect sailing weather, had had his boat painted, and had relapsed into his normal habit of spending as much of his time as was convenient on the lake.

There was still the mingled collapse and stir in the air that comes between the end of an old regime and the beginning of a new. Christopher had resigned his appointment at Copenhagen, feeling that his life would, for the future, be vaguely filled with new duties and occupations, but he had not as yet discovered anything very novel to do beyond signing his name a good many times, and trying to become accustomed to hearing himself called Sir Christopher; occupations that seemed rather elementary in the construction of a career. His want of initiative energy in every-day matters kept him motionless and apathetic, waiting for his new atmosphere to make itself palpable to him, and prepared to resign himself to its conditions. He even, in his unquenchable self-consciousness, knew that it would be wholesome for him if these were such as he least liked; but, in the meantime, he remained pa.s.sively unsettled, and a letter from Lord Castlemore, in which his tact and conscientiousness as a secretary were fully set forth, roused no outside ambition in him. He re-read it on a s.h.i.+mmering May morning, with one arm hanging over the tiller of his boat, as she crept with scarcely breathing sails through the pale streaks of calm that lay like dreams upon the lake. He was close under the woods of Bruff, close enough to feel how still and busy they were in the industry of spring. It seemed to him that the sound of the insects was like the humming of her loom, and almost mechanically he turned over the envelope of Lord Castlemore's letter, and began in the old familiar way to scrawl a line or two on the back of it.

The well-known crest, however, disconcerted his fancy, and he fell again to ruminating upon the letter itself. If this expressed the sum of his abilities, diplomatic life was certainly not worth living. Tact and conscientiousness were qualities that would grace the discharge of a doctor's butler, and might be expected from anyone of the most ordinary intelligence. He could not think that his services to his country, as concentrated in Lord Castlemore, were at all remarkable; they had given him far less trouble than the most worthless of those efforts in prose and verse, that, as he thought contemptuously, were like the skeletons that mark the desert course of a caravan; he did not feel the difficulty, and he, therefore, thought the achievement small. A toying breeze fluttered the letter in his hand, and the boat tilted languidly in recognition of it. The water began to murmur about the keel, and Christopher presently found himself gliding smoothly towards the middle of the lake.

He looked across at Lismoyle, spreading placidly along the margin of the water, and as he felt the heat of the sun and the half-forgotten largeness of summer in the air, he could have believed himself back in the August of last year, and he turned his eyes to the trees of Rosemount as if the sight of them would bring disillusionment. it was some time now since he had first been made ashamed of the discovery that disillusionment also meant relief. For some months he had clung to his dream; at first helplessly, with a sore heart, afterwards with a more conscious taking hold, as of something gained, that made life darker, but for ever richer. It had been torture to drive away from Tally Ho with the knowledge that Hawkins was preferred to him, torture of the most simple, unbearable kind; but sentiment had deftly usurped the place of his blind suffering, and that stage came that is almost inevitable with poetic natures, when the artistic sense can a.n.a.lyse sorrow, and sees the beauty of defeat. Then he had heard that Francie was going to Marry Lambert, and the news had done more in one moment to disillusion him than common sense could do in years. The thought stung him with a kind of horror for her that she could tolerate such a fate as marrying Roddy Lambert. He knew nothing of the tyrannies of circ.u.mstance. To prosperous young men like Christopher, poverty, except barefooted and in rage, is a name, and unpaid bills a joke. That Albatross Villa could have driven her to the tremendous surrender of marriage was a thing incredible. All that was left for him to believe was that he had been mistaken, and that the lucent quality that he thought he had found in her soul had existed only in his imagination. Now when he thought of her face it was with a curious half-regret that so beautiful a thing should no longer have any power to move him. Some sense of loss remained,but it was charged with self-pity for the loss of an ideal. Another man in Christopher's position would not probably have troubled himself about ideals, but Christopher, fortunately, or unfortunately for him, was not like other men.

The fact must even be faced that he had probably never been in love with her, according to the common acceptation of the term. His intellect exhausted his emotions and killed them with solicitude, as a child digs up a flower to see if it is growing, and his emotions themselves had a feminine refinement, but lacked the feminine quality of unreasoning pertinacity. From self-pity for the loss of an ideal to grat.i.tude for an escape is not far to go, and all that now remained to him of bitterness was a gentle self-contempt for his own inadequacy in falling in love, as in everything else.

It may be imagined that in Lismoyle Francie was a valued and almost invariable topic of conversation. Each visitor to Rosemount went there in the character of a scout, and a detailed account of her interview was published on every possible occasion.

”Well, I took my time about calling on her,” observed Mrs. Baker; ”I thought I'd let her see I was in no hurry.”

Mrs. Corkran, with whom Mrs. Baker was having tea, felt guiltily conscious of having called on Mrs. Lambert two days after her arrival, and hastened to remind the company of the pastoral nature of the attention.

”Oh, of course we know clergymen's families can't pick their company,” went on Mrs. Baker, dismissing the interruption not without a secret satisfaction that Carrie Beattie, who, in the absense of Miss Corkran, was pouring out tea for her future mother-in-law, should see that other people did not consider the Rev. Joseph such a catch as she did. ”Only that Lambert's such a friend of Mr. Baker's, and always banked with him, I declare I don't know that I'd have gone at all. I a.s.sure you it gave me quite a turn to see her stuck up there in poor Lucy Lambert's chair, talking about the grand hotels that she was in, in London and Paris, as if she never swept out a room or cleaned a saucepan in her life.”

”She had all the walls done round with those penny fans,” struck in Miss Kathleen Baker, ”and a box of French bongbongs out on the table; and oh, mamma! did you notice the big photograph of him and her together on the chimney-piece?”

”I could notice nothing, Kathleen, and I didn't want to notice them” replied Mrs. Baker; ”I could think of nothing but of what poor Lucy Lambert would say to see her husband dancing attendance on that young hussy without so much as a mourning ring on him, and her best tea-service thrashed about as if it was kitchen delft.”

”Was he very devoted, Mrs. Baker?” asked Miss Beattie with a simper.

”Oh, I suppose he was,” answered Mrs. Baker, as if in contempt for any sentiment inspired by Francie, ”but I can't say I observed anything very particular.”

”Oh, then I did!” said Miss Baker with a nod of superior intelligence; ”I was watching them all the time; every word she uttered he was listening to it, and when she asked for the tea-cosy he flew for it, and oh! the tender looks he cast at her!”

”Eliza Hackett told my Maria there was shocking waste going on in the house now; fires in the drawing-room from eight o'clock in the morning, and this the month of May!” said Mrs. Corkran with an approving eye at the cascade of cut paper that decked her own grate, ”and the cold meat given to the boy that cleans the boots!”

”Roddy Lambert'll be sorry for it some day when it's too late,” said Mrs. Baker darkly, ”but men are all alike; it's out of sight out of mind with them!”

”Oh, Mrs. Baker,” wheezed Mrs. Corkran with asthmatic fervour, ”I think you're altogether too cynical; I'm sure that's not your opinion of Mr. Baker.”

”I don't know what he might do if I was dead,” replied Mrs. Baker, ”but I'll answer for it he'll not be carrying on with Number Two while I'm alive, like other people I know!”

”Oh, don't say such things before these young ladies,” said Mrs. Corkran; ”I wish them no greater blessing of Providence than a good husband, and I think I may say that dear Carry will find one in my Joseph.” The almost death-bed solemnity of this address paralysed the conversation for a moment, and Miss Beattie concealed her blushes by going to the window to see whose was the vehicle that had just driven by.

”Oh, it's Mr. Hawkins!” she exclaimed, feeling the importance of the information.

Kathleen Baker sprang from her seat and ran to the window. ”So it is!” she cried, ”and I bet you sixpence he's going to Rosemount! My goodness, I wish it was to-day we had gone there!”

CHAPTER XLIII.

Hawkins had, like Mrs. Baker, been in no hurry to call upon the bride. He had seen her twice in church, he had once met her out driving with her husband, and, lastly, he had come upon her face to face in the princ.i.p.al street of Lismoyle, and had received a greeting of aristocratic hauteur, as remarkable as the newly acquired English accent in which it was delivered. After these things a visit to her was unavoidable, and, in spite of a bad conscience, he felt, when he at last set out for Rosemount, an excitment that was agreeable after the calm of life at Lismoyle.

There was no one in the drawing-room when he was shown into it, and as the maid closed the door behind him he heard a quick step run through the hall land up the stairs. ”Gone to put on her best bib and tucker,” he said to himself with an increase of confidence; ”I'll bet she saw me coming.” The large photograph alluded to by Miss Baker was on the chimneypiece, and he walked over and examined it with great interest. It obeyed the traditions of honeymoon portraits, and had the inevitable vulgarity of such; Lambert, sitting down, turned the leaves of a book, and Francie, standing behind him, rested one hand on his shoulder, while the other held a basket of flowers. In spite of its fatuity as a composition, both portraits were good, and they had moreover an air of prosperity and new clothes that Mr. Hawkins found to be almost repulsive. He studied the photograph with deepening distaste until he was aware of a footstep at the door, and braced himself for the encounter, with his heart beating uncomfortably and unexpectedly.

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