Part 21 (1/2)

They shook hands with the politeness of slight acquaintance, and sat down, Hawkins thinking he had never seen her look so pretty or so smart, and wondering what he was going to talk to her about. It was evidently going to be war to the knife, he thought, as he embarked haltingly upon the weather, and found that he was far less at his ease than he had expected to be.

”Yes, it's warmer here than it was in England,” said Francie, looking languidly at the rings on her left hand; ”we were persihed there after Paris.”

She felt that the familiar mention of such names must of necessity place her in a superior position, and she was so stimulated by their a.s.sociations with her present grandeur that she raised her eyes, and looked at him. Their eyes met with as keen a sense of contact as if their hands had suddenly touched, and each, with a perceptible jerk, looked away.

”You say that Paris was hot, was it?” said Hawkins, with something of an effort. ”I haven't been there since I went with some people the year before last, and it was as hot then as they make it. I thought it rather a hole.”

”Oh, indeed?” said Francie, chillingly; ”Mr. Lambert and I enjoyed it greatly. You've been here all the spring, I suppose?”

”Yes; I haven't been out of this place, except for Punchestown, since I came back from leave;” then with a reckless feeling that he would break up this frozen sea of plat.i.tudes, ”since that time that I met you on the pier at Kingstown.”

”Oh yes,” said Francie, as if trying to recall some unimportant incident; ”you were there with the Dysarts, weren't you?”

Hawkins became rather red. She was palpably overdoing it, but that did not diminish the fact that he was being snubbed, and though he might, in a general and guarded way, have admitted that he deserved it, he realised that he bitterly resented being snubbed by Francie.

”Yes,” he said, with an indifference as deliberately exaggerated as her own, ”I tavelled over with them. I remember how surprised we were to see you and Mr. Lambert there.”

She felt the intention on his part to say something disagreeable, and it stung her more than the words.

”Why were you surprised?” she asked coolly.

”Well-er-I don't exactly know,” stammered Mr. Hawkins, a good deal taken aback by the directness of the inquiry; ”we didn't exactly know where you were-thought Lambert was at Lismoyle, you know.” He bagan to wish he had brought Cursiter with him; no one could have guessed that she would have turned into such a cat and given herself such airs; her ultra-refinement, and her affected accent, and her exceeding prettiness, exasperated him in a way that he could not have explained, and though the visit did not fail of excitement, he could not flatter himself that he was taking quite the part in it that he had expected. Certainly Mrs. Lambert was not maintaining the role that he had allotted her; huffiness was one thing, but infernal swagger was quite another. It is painful for a young man of Mr. Hawkins' type to realise that an affection that he has inspired can wane and even die, and Francie's self-possession was fast robbing him of his own.

”I hear that your regiment is after being ordered to India?” she said cheerfully, when it became apparent that Hawkins could find no more to say.

”Yes, so they say; next trooping season will about see us I expect, and they're safe to send us to Aldershot first, so we may be out of this at any minute.” He glanced at her as he spoke, to see how she took it.

”Oh, that'll be very nice for you,” answered Francie still more cheerfully. ”I suppose,” she went on with her most aristocratic drawl,”that you'll be married before you go out?”

She had arranged the delivery of this thrust before she came downstairs, and it glided from her tongue as easily as she could have wished.

”Yes, I daresay I shall,” he answered defiantly, though the provokingly ready blush of fair man leaped to his face. He looked at her, angry with himself for reddening, and angrier with her for blazoning her indifference, by means of a question that seemed to him the height of bad taste and spitefulness. As he looked, the colour that burned in his own face repeated itself in hers with slow relentlessness; at the sight of it a sudden revulsion of feeling brought him dangeroulsy near to calling her by her name, with reproaches for her heartlessness, but before the word took form she had risen quickly, and, saying something incoherent about ordering tea, moved towards the bell, her head turned from him with the helpless action of a shy child.

Hawkins, hardly knowing what he was doing, started forward, and as he did so the door opened, and a well-known voice announced ”Miss Charlotte Mullen!”

The owner of the voice advanced into the room, and saw, as anyone must have seen, the flushed faces of its two occupants, and felt that nameless quality in the air that tells of interruption.

”I took the liberty of announcing myself,” she said, with her most affable smile; ”I knew you were at home, as I saw Mr. Hawkins' trap at the door, and I just walked in.”

As she shook hands and sat down she expanded easily into a facetious description of the difficulties of getting her old horse along the road from Gurthnamuckla, and by the time she had finished her story Hawkins' complexion had regained its ordinary tone, and Francie had resumed the air of elegant nonchalance appropriate to the importance of the married state. Nothing, in fact, could have been more admirable than Miss Mullen's manner. She praised Francie's new chair covers and Indian tea; she complimented Mr. Hawkins on his new pony; even going so far as to reproach him for not having been out to Gurthnamuckla to see her, till Francie felt some p.r.i.c.ks of conscience about the sceptical way that she and Lambert had laughed together over Charlotte's amiability when she paid her first visit to them. She found inexpressible ease in the presence of a third person as capable as Charlotte of carrying on a conversation with the smallest possible a.s.sistance; shaltered by it she slowly recovered from her mental overthrow, and, furious as she was with Hawkins for his part in it, she was begnning to be able to patronise him again by the time that he got up to go away.

”Well, Francie, my dear child,” began Charlotte, as soon as the door had closed behind him, ”I've scarcely had a word with you since you came home. You had such a reception the last day I was here that I had to content myself with talking to Mrs. Beattie, and hearing all about the price of underclothes. Indeed I had a good mind to tell her that only for your magnanimity she wouldn't be having so much to say about Carrie's trousseau!”

”Indeed she was welcome to him!” said Francie, putting her chin in the air, ”that little wretch, indeed!”

It was one of the moments when she touched the extreme of satisfation in being married, and in order to cover, for her own and Charlotte's sake, the remembrance of that idiotic blush, she a.s.sumed a little extra bravado.

”Talking of your late admirers-” went on Charlotte, ”for I hope for poor Roody's sake they're not present ones-I never saw a young fellow so improved in his manners as Mr. Hawkins. There was a time I didn't fancy him-as you may remember, though we've agreed to say nothing more about our old squabbles- but I think he's chastened by adversity. That engagement, you know-” she paused, and cast a side-long, un.o.btrusive glance at Francie. ”He's not the first young man that's been whipped in before marriage as well as after it, and I think the more he looks at it the less he likes it.”

”He's been looking at it a long time now,” said Francie with a laugh that was intended to be careless, but into which a sneer made its way. ”I wonder Roddy isn't in,” she continued, changing the subject to one in which no pit-falls lurked; ”I wouldn't be surprised if he'd gone to Gurthnamuckla to see you, Charlotte; he's been saying ever since we came back he wanted to have a talk with you, but he's been so busy he hadn't a minute.”

”If I'm not greatly mistaken,” said Charlotte, standing up so as to be able to see out of the window, ”here's the man of the house himself. What horse is that he's on?” her eyes taking in with unwilling admiration the swaggering ease of seat and squareness of shoulder that had so often captivated her taste, as Lambert, not unaware of spectators at the window, overcame much callow remonstrance on the part of the young horse he was riding, at being asked to stand at the door till a boy came round to take him.

”Oh, that's the new four-year-old that Roddy had taken in off Gurthnamuckla while we were away,” said Francie, leaning her elbow against the shutter and looking out too. ”He's an awful wild young brat of a thing! Look at the way he's hoisting now! Roddy says he'll have me up on him beofe the summer's out, but I tell him that if he does I won't be on him long.” Her eyes met her husband's, and she laughed and tapped on the gla.s.s, beckoning imperiously to him to come in.

Charlotte turned away from the window, and when, a few minutes afterwards, Mr. Lambert came into the room, the visitor had put her gloves on, and was making her farewells to her hostess.

”No, Roddy,” she said, ”I must be off now. I'm like the beggars, 'tay and turn out' is my motto. But supposing now that you bring this young lady over to lunch with me to-morrow-no, not to-morrow, that's Sunday-come on Monday. How would that suit your book?”

Lambert a.s.sented with a good grace that struck Francie as being wonderfull well a.s.sumed, and followed Miss Mullen out to put her in her phaeton.

Francie closed the door behind them, and sat down. She was glad she had met Hawkins and got it over, and as she reviewed the incidents of his visit, she thought that on the whole she had come very near her own ideal of behaviour. Cool, sarcastic, and dignified, even though she had, for one moment, got a little red, he could not but feel that she had acted as became a married lady, and shown him his place once for all. As for him, he had been horrible, she thought bitterly; sitting up and talking to her as if he had never seen her before, and going on as if he had never -she got up hastily as if to escape from the hateful memories of last year that thrust themselves suddenly into her thoughts. How thankful she was that she had shown him she was not inconsolable; she wished that Roddy had come in while he was there, and had stood over him, and overshadowed him with his long legs and broad shoulders, and his air of master of the house. Why on earth had Charlotte praised him? Gurthnamuckla must have had the most extraordinarily sweetening effect upon her, for she seemed to have a good word for everybody now, and Roddy's notion that she would want to be coaxed into a good temper was all nonsense, and conceited nonsense too, and so she would tell him. It was not in Francie's light, wholesome nature to bear malice; the least flutter of the olive branch, the faintest glimmer of the flag of truce, was enough to make her forgive an injury and forget an insult.

When her husband came back she turned towards him with a sparkle in her eye.

”Well, Roddy, I hope you squeezed her hand when you were saying good-bye! I daresay now you'll want me to believe that it's all in honour of you that she's asked us over to lunch to-morrow, and I suppose that's what she was telling you out in the hall. Aren't you sorry you didn't marry her instead of me?”

Lambert did not answer, but came over to where she was standing, and putting his arm round her, drew her towards him and kissed her with a pa.s.sion that seemed too serious an answer to her question. She could not know, as she laughed and hid her face from him, that he was saying to himself, ”Of course he was bound to come and call, he'd have had to do that no matter who she was!”

CHAPTER XLIV.

Spring, that year, came delicately in among the Galway hills; in primroses, in wild bursts of gorse, and in the later snow of hawthorn, unbeaten by the rain or the wet west wind of rougher seasons. A cuckoo had dropped out of s.p.a.ce into the copse at the back of Gurthnamuckla, and kept calling there with a l.u.s.ty sweetness; a mist of green was breathed upon the trees, and in the meadows by the lake a corncrake was adding a diffident guttural or two to the chirruping chorus of coots and moorhens. Mr. Lambert's three-year-olds grew and flourished on the young rich gra.s.s, and, in the turbulence of their joie de vivre, hunted the lambs, and bit the calves, and jumped every barrier that the ingenuity of Miss Mullen's herdsman could devise. ”Those brutes must be put into the Stone Field,” the lady of the house had said, regarding their gambols with a sour eye; ”I don't care whether the gra.s.s is good or bad, they'll have to do with it;” and when she and her guests went forth after their lunch to inspect the farm in general and the young horses in particular, it was to the Stone Field that they first bent their steps.

No one who has the idea of a green-embowered English lane can hope to realise the fortified alley that wound through the heart of the pastures of Gurthnamuckla, and was known as the Farm Lane. It was scarcely wide enough for two people to walk abreast; loose stone walls, of four or five feet in thickness, towered on either side of it as high as the head of a tall man; to meet a cow in it involved either retreat or the perilous ascent of one of the walls. It embodied the simple expedient of by-gone farmers for clearing their fields of stones, and contained raw material enough to build a church. Charlotte, Mr. Lambert and Francie advanced in single file along its meaningless windings, until it finished its career at the gate of the Stone Field, a long tongue of pasture that had the lake for a boundary on three of its sides, and was cut off from the mainland by a wall not inferior in height and solidity to those of the lane.

”There, Roddy,” said Miss Mullen, as she opened the gate, ”there's where I had to banish them, and I don't think they're too badly off.”

The young horses were feeding at the farthest point of the field, fetlock deep in the flowery gra.s.s, with the sparkling blue of the lake making a background to their slender shapes.

”They look like money, Charlotte, I think. That brown filly ought to bring a hundred at least next Ballinasloe fair, when she knows how to jump,” said Lambert, as he and Charlotte walked across the field, leaving Francie, who saw no reason for pretending an interest that was not expected of her, to amuse herself by picking cowslips near the gate.

”I'm glad to hear you say that, Roddy,” replied Charlotte. ”It's a comfort to think anything looks like money these bad times; I've never known prices so low.”

”They're lower than I ever thought they'd go, by Jove,” Lambert answered gloomily. ”I'm going up to Mayo, collecting, next week, and if I don't do better there than I've done here, I daresay Dysart won't think so much of his father's shoes after all.”

He was striding along, taking no trouble to suit his pace to Charlotte's, and perhaps the indifference to her companions.h.i.+p that it showed, as well as the effort involved in keeping beside him, had the effect of irritating her.

”Maybe he might think them good enough to kick people out with,” she said with a disagreeable laugh; ”I remember, in the good old times, when my father and Sir Benjamin ruled the roast, we heard very little about bad collections.”

It struck Lambert that though this was the obvious moment for that business talk that he had come over for, it was not a propitious one. ”I wonder if the macaroni cheese disagreed with her,” he thought; ”it was beastly enough to do it, anyhow. You may remember,” he said aloud, ”that in the good old times the property was worth just about double what it is now, and a matter of three or four hundred pounds either way made no difference to signify.”

”D'ye think ye'll be that much short this time?”

She darted the question at him with such keenness that Lambert inwardly recoiled before it, though it was the point to which he had wished to bring her.