A damp winter and a chilly spring had passed in their usual mildly
disagreeable manner over that small Irish country town which was alluded
to in the beginning of the last chapter. The shop windows had exhibited
their usual zodiacal succession, and had progressed through red
comforters and woollen gloves, to straw hats, tennis shoes, and coloured
Summer Numbers. The residents of Lismoyle were already congratulating
each other on having “set” their lodgings to the summer visitors; the
steamer was plying on the lake, the militia was under canvas, and on
this very fifteenth of June, Lady Dysart of Bruff was giving her first
lawn-tennis party.
Miss Charlotte Mullen had taken advantage of the occasion to emerge from
the mourning attire that since her aunt’s death had so misbecome her
sallow face, and was driving herself to Bruff in the phæton that had
been Mrs. Mullen’s, and a gown chosen with rather more view to effect
than was customary with her. She was under no delusion as to her
appearance, and, early recognising its hopeless character, she had
abandoned all superfluities of decoration. A habit of costume so
defiantly simple as to border on eccentricity had at least two
advantages; it freed her from the absurdity of seeming to admire
herself, and it was cheap. During the late Mrs. Mullen’s lifetime
Charlotte had studied economy. The most reliable old persons had, she
was wont to reflect, a slippery turn in them where their wills were
concerned, and it was well to be ready for any contingency of fortune.
Things had turned out very well after all; there had been one
inconvenient legacy--that “Little Francie” to whom the old lady’s
thoughts had turned, happily too late for her to give any practical
emphasis to them--but that bequest was of the kind that may be
repudiated if desirable. The rest of the disposition had been admirably
convenient, and, in skilled hands, something might even be made of that
legacy. Miss Mullen thought a great deal about her legacy and the steps
she had taken with regard to it as she drove to Bruff. The horse that
drew her ancient phæton moved with a dignity befitting his eight and
twenty years; the three miles of level lake-side road between Lismoyle
and Bruff were to him a serious undertaking, and by the time he had
arrived at his destination, his mistress’s active mind had pursued many
pleasant mental paths to their utmost limit.
This was the first of the two catholic and comprehensive entertainments
that Lady Dysart’s sense of her duty towards her neighbours yearly
impelled her to give, and when Charlotte, wearing her company smile,
came down the steps of the terrace to meet her hostess, the difficult
revelry was at its height. Lady Dysart had cast her nets over a wide
expanse, and the result was not encouraging. She stood, tall, dark and
majestic, on the terrace, surveying the impracticable row of women that
stretched, forlorn of men, along one side of the tennis grounds, much as
Cassandra might have scanned the beleaguering hosts from the ramparts of
Troy; and as she advanced to meet her latest guest, her strong,
clear-eyed face was perplexed and almost tragic.
“How do you do, Miss Mullen?” she said in tones of unconcealed gloom.
“Have you ever seen so few men in your life? and there are five and
forty women! I cannot imagine where they have all come from, but I know
where I wish they would take themselves to, and that is to the bottom of
the lake!”
The large intensity of Lady Dysart’s manner gave unintended weight to
her most trivial utterance, and had she reflected very deeply before she
spoke, it might have occurred to her that this was not a specially
fortunate manner of greeting a female guest. But Charlotte understood
that nothing personal was intended; she knew that the freedom of Bruff
had been given to her, and that she could afford to listen to abuse of
the outer world with the composure of one of the inner circle.
“Well, your ladyship,” she said, in the bluff, hearty voice which she
felt accorded best with the theory of herself that she had built up in
Lady Dysart’s mind, “I’ll head a forlorn hope to the bottom of the lake
for you, and welcome; but for the honour of the house, you might give
me a cup o’ tay first!”
Charlotte had many tones of voice, according with the many facets of her
character, and when she wished to be playful she affected a vigorous
brogue, not perhaps being aware that her own accent scarcely admitted of
being strengthened.
This refinement of humour was probably wasted on Lady Dysart. She was an
Englishwoman, and, as such, was constitutionally unable to discern
perfectly the subtle grades of Irish vulgarity. She was aware that many
of the ladies on her visiting list were vulgar, but it was their
subjects of conversation and their opinions that chiefly brought the
fact home to her. Miss Mullen, _au fond_, was probably no less vulgar
than they, but she was never dull, and Lady Dysart would suffer anything
rather than dulness. It was less than nothing to her that Charlotte’s
mother was reported to have been in her youth a national schoolmistress,
and her grandmother a bare-footed country girl. These facts of Miss
Mullen’s pedigree were valued topics in Lismoyle, but Lady Dysart’s
serene radicalism ignored the inequalities of a lower class, and she
welcomed a woman who could talk to her on spiritualism, or books, or
indeed on any current topic, with a point and agreeability that made her
accent, to English ears, merely the expression of a vigorous
individuality. She now laughed in response to her visitor’s jest, but
her eye did not cease from roving over the gathering, and her broad brow
was still contracted in calculation.
“I never knew the country so bereft of men or so peopled with girls!
Even the little Barrington boys are off with the militia, and everyone
about has conspired to fill their houses with women, and not only women
but dummies!” Her glance lighted on the long bench where sat the more
honourable women in midge-bitten dulness. “And there is Kate Gascogne in
one of her reveries, not hearing a word that Mrs. Waller is saying to
her--”
With Lady Dysart intention was accomplishment as nearly as might be. She
had scarcely finished speaking before she began a headlong advance upon
the objects of her diatribe, making a short cut across the corner of a
lawn-tennis court, and scarcely observing the havoc that her transit
wrought in the game. Charlotte was less rash. She steered her course
clear of the tennis grounds, and of the bench of matrons, passed the six
Miss Beatties with a comprehensive “How are ye, girls?” and took up her
position under one of the tall elm trees.
Under the next tree a few men were assembled, herding together for
mutual protection after the manner of men, and laying down the law to
each other about road sessions, the grand jury, and Irish politics
generally. They were a fairly representative trio; a country gentleman
with a grey moustache and a loud voice in which he was announcing that
nothing would give him greater pleasure than to pull the rope at the
execution of a certain English statesman; a slight, dejected-looking
clergyman, who vied with Major Waller in his denunciations, but
chastenedly, like an echo in a cathedral aisle; and a smartly dressed
man of about thirty-five, of whom a more detailed description need not
be given, as he has been met with in the first chapter, and the six
years after nine-and-twenty do little more than mellow a man’s taste in
checks, and sprinkle a grey hair or two on his temples.
Miss Mullen listened for a few minutes to the melancholy pessimisms of
the archdeacon, and then, interrupting Major Waller in a fine outburst
on the advisability of martial law, she thrust herself and her attendant
cloud of midges into the charmed circle of the smoke of Mr. Lambert’s
cigarette.
“Ho! do I hear me old friend the Major at politics?” she said, shaking
hands effusively with the three men. “I declare I’m a better politician
than any one of you! D’ye know how I served Tom Casey, the land-leaguing
plumber, yesterday? I had him mending my tank, and when I got him into
it I whipped the ladder away, and told him not a step should he budge
till he sang ‘God save the Queen!’ I was arguing there half an hour with
him in water up to his middle before I converted him, and then it wasn’t
so much the warmth of his convictions as the cold of his legs made him
tune up. I call that practical politics!”
The speed and vigour with which this story was told would have astounded
anyone who did not know Miss Mullen’s powers of narration, but Mr.
Lambert, to whom it seemed specially addressed, merely took his
cigarette out of his mouth, and said, with a familiar laugh:
“Practical politics, by Jove! I call it a cold water cure. Kill or cure
like the rest of your doctoring, eh! Charlotte?”
Miss Mullen joined with entire good-humour in the laugh that followed.
“Oh, th’ ingratitude of man!” she exclaimed. “Archdeacon, you’ve seen
his bald scalp from the pulpit, and I ask you, now, isn’t that a fresh
crop he has on it? I leave it to his conscience, if he has one, to say
if it wasn’t my doctoring gave him that fine black thatch he has now!”
The archdeacon fixed his eyes seriously upon her; Charlotte’s
playfulness always alarmed and confused him.
“Do not appeal to me, Miss Mullen,” he answered, in his refined,
desponding voice; “my unfortunate sight makes my evidence in such a
matter worth nothing; and, by the way, I meant to ask you if your niece
would be good enough to help us in the choir? I understand she sings.”
Charlotte interrupted him.
“There’s another of you at it!” she exclaimed. “I think I’ll have to
ad_ver_tiss in the _Irish Times_ that, whereas my first cousin, Isabella
Mullen, married Johnny Fitzpatrick, who was no relation of mine, good,
bad, or indifferent, their child is my first cousin once removed, and
_not_ my niece!”
Mr. Lambert blew a cloud of smoke through his nose.
“You’re a nailer at pedigrees, Charlotte,” he said with a patronage that
he knew was provoking; “but as far as I can make out the position, it
comes to mighty near the same thing; you’re what they call her Welsh
aunt, anyhow.”
Charlotte’s face reddened, and she opened her wide mouth for a retort,
but before she had time for more than the champings as of a horse with a
heavy bit, which preceded her more incisive repartees, another person
joined the group.
“Mr. Lambert,” said Pamela Dysart, in her pleasant, anxious voice, “I am
going to ask you if you will play in the next set, or if you would
rather help the Miss Beatties to get up a round of golf? How do you do,
Miss Mullen? I have not seen you before; why did you not bring your
niece with you?”
Charlotte showed all her teeth in a forced smile as she replied, “I
suppose you mean my cousin, Miss Dysart; she won’t be with me till the
day after to-morrow.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” replied Pamela, with the sympathetic politeness that
made strangers think her manner too good to be true; “and Mr. Lambert
tells me she plays tennis so well.”
“Why, what does he know about her tennis playing?” said Charlotte,
turning sharply towards Lambert.
The set on the nearer court was over, and the two young men who had
played in it strolled up to the group as she spoke. Mr. Lambert expanded
his broad chest, gave his hat an extra tilt over his nose, and looked
rather more self-complacent than usual as he replied:
“Well, I ought to know something about it, seeing I took her in hand
when she was in short petticoats--taught her her paces myself, in fact.”
Mr. Hawkins, the shorter of the two players who had just come up, ceased
from mopping his scarlet face, and glanced from Mr. Lambert to Pamela
with a countenance devoid of expression, save that conferred by the
elevation of one eyebrow almost to the roots of his yellow hair.
Pamela’s eyes remained unresponsive, but the precipitancy with which she
again addressed herself to Mr. Lambert showed that a disposition to
laugh had been near.
Charlotte turned away with an expression that was the reverse of
attractive. When her servants saw that look they abandoned excuse or
discussion; when the Lismoyle beggars saw it they checked the flow of
benediction and fled. Even the archdeacon, through the religious halo
that habitually intervened between him and society, became aware that
the moment was not propitious for speaking to Miss Mullen about his
proposed changes in the choir, and he drifted away to think of diocesan
matters, and to forget as far as possible that he was at a lawn-tennis
party.
Outside the group stood the young man who had been playing in the set
with Mr. Hawkins. He was watching through an eyeglass the limp progress
of the game in the other court, and was even making praiseworthy
attempts to applaud the very feeble efforts of the players. He was tall
and slight, with a near-sighted stoop, and something of an
old-fashioned, eighteenth century look about him that was accentuated by
his not wearing a moustache, and was out of keeping with the flannels
and brilliant blazer that are the revolutionary protest of this age
against its orthodox clothing. It did not seem to occur to him that he
was doing anything unusual in occupying himself, as he was now doing, in
picking up balls for the Lismoyle curate and his partner; he would have
thought it much more remarkable had he found in himself a preference for
doing anything else. This was an occupation that demanded neither
interest nor conversation, and of a number of disagreeable duties he did
not think that he had chosen the worst.
Charlotte walked up to him as he stood leaning against a tree, and held
out her hand.
“How d’ye do, Mr. Dysart?” she said with marked politeness. All trace of
combat had left her manner, and the smile with which she greeted him was
sweet and capacious. “We haven’t seen you in Lismoyle since you came
back from the West Indies.”
Christopher Dysart let his eyeglass fall, and looked apologetic as he
enclosed her well-filled glove in his long hand, and made what excuses
he could for not having called upon Miss Mullen.
“Since Captain Thesiger has got this new steam-launch I can’t call my
soul my own; I’m out on the lake with him half the day, and the other
half I spend with a nail-brush trying to get the blacks off.”
He spoke with a hesitation that could hardly be called a stammer, but
was rather a delaying before his sentences, a mental rather than a
physical uncertainty.
“Oh, that’s a very poor excuse,” said Charlotte with loud affability,
“deserting your old friends for the blacks a second time! I thought you
had enough of them in the last two years! And you know you promised--or
your good mother did for you--that you’d come and photograph poor old
Mrs. Tommy before she died. The poor thing’s so sick now we have to feed
her with a baby’s bottle.”
Christopher wondered if Mrs. Tommy were the cook, and was on the point
of asking for further particulars, when Miss Mullen continued:
“She’s the great-great-grandmother of all me cats, and I want you to
immortalise her; but don’t come till after Monday, as I’d like to
introduce you to my cousin, Miss Fitzpatrick; did you hear she was
coming?”
“Yes, Mr. Lambert told us she was to be here next week,” said
Christopher, with an indescribable expression that was not quite
amusement, but was something more than intelligence.
“What did he say of her?”
Christopher hesitated; somehow what he remembered of Mr. Lambert’s
conversation was of too free and easy a nature for repetition to Miss
Fitzpatrick’s cousin.
“He--er--seemed to think her very--er--charming in all ways,” he said
rather lamely.
“So it’s talking of charming young ladies you and Roddy Lambert are when
he comes to see you on estate business!” said Charlotte archly, but with
a rasp in her voice. “When my poor father was your father’s agent, and I
used to be helping him in the office, it was charming young cattle we
talked about, and not young ladies.”
Christopher laughed in a helpless way.
“I wish you were at the office still, Miss Mullen; if anyone could
understand the Land Act I believe it would be you.”
At this moment there was an upheaval among the matrons; the long line
rose and broke, and made for the grey stone house whose windows were
flashing back the sunlight through the trees at the end of the
lawn-tennis grounds. The tedious skirmish with midges, and the strain of
inactivity, were alike over for the present, and the conscience of the
son of the house reminded him that he ought to take Miss Mullen in to
tea.