Norry the Boat toiled up the back stairs with wrath in her heart. She
had been listening for some minutes with grim enjoyment to cries from
the landing upstairs; unavailing calls for Louisa, interspersed with the
dumb galvanic quiver of a bell-less bellwire, and at last Francie’s
voice at the angle half-way down the kitchen stairs had entreated her to
find and despatch to her the missing Protestant orphan. Then Norry had
said to herself, while she lifted the pot of potatoes off the fire,
“Throuble-the-house! God knows I’m heart-scalded with the whole o’
yees!” And then aloud, “She’s afther goin’ out to the dhryin’ ground to
throw out a few aper’rns to blaych.”
“Well, I _must_ have somebody; I can’t get my habit on,” the voice had
wailed in reply. “Couldn’t you come, Norry?”
As we have said, Norry ascended the stairs with wrath in her heart, as
gruesome a lady’s-maid as could well be imagined, with an apron mottled
with grease spots, and a stale smell of raw onions pervading her
generally. Francie was standing in front of the dim looking-glass with
which Charlotte chastened the vanity of her guests, trying with stiff
and tired fingers to drag the buttons of a brand new habit through the
unyielding buttonholes that tailors alone have the gift of making, and
Norry’s anger was forgotten in prayerful horror, as her eyes wandered
from the hard felt hat to the trousered ankle that appeared beneath the
skimpy and angular skirt.
“The Lord look down in pity on thim that cut that petticoat!” she said.
“Sure, it’s not out in the sthreets ye’re goin’ in the like o’ that! God
knows it’d be as good for ye to be dhressed like a man altogether!”
“I wouldn’t care what I was dressed like if I could only make the
beastly thing meet,” said Francie, her face flushed with heat and
effort; “wasn’t I the fool to tell him to make it tight in the waist!”
The subsequent proceedings were strenuous, but in the end successful,
and finally Miss Fitzpatrick walked stiffly downstairs, looking very
slender and tall, with the tail of the dark green habit--she had felt
green to be the colour consecrated to sport--drawn tightly round her,
and a silver horse-shoe brooch at her throat.
Charlotte was standing at the open hall door talking to Mr. Lambert.
“Come along, child,” she said genially, “you’ve been so long adorning
yourself that nothing but his natural respect for the presence of a
lady kept this gentleman from indulging in abusive language.”
Charlotte, in her lighter moods, was addicted to a ponderous persiflage,
the aristocratic foster-sister of her broader peasant jestings in the
manner of those whom she was fond of describing as “the _bar purple_.”
Mr. Lambert did not trouble himself to reply to this sally. He was
looking at the figure in the olive-green habit that was advancing along
the path of sunlight to the doorway, and thinking that he had done well
to write that letter on the subject of the riding that Francie might
expect to have at Lismoyle. Charlotte turned her head also to look at
the radiant, sunlit figure.
“Why, child, were you calling Norry just now to melt you down and pour
you into that garment? I never saw such a waist! Take care and don’t let
her fall off, Roddy, or she’ll snap in two!” She laughed loudly and
discordantly, looking to Mr. Lambert’s groom for the appreciation that
was lacking in the face of his master; and during the arduous process of
getting Miss Fitzpatrick into her saddle she remained on the steps,
offering facetious suggestions and warnings, with her short arms akimbo,
and a smile that was meant to be jovial accentuating the hard lines of
her face.
At last the green habit was adjusted, the reins placed properly between
Francie’s awkward fingers, and Mr. Lambert had mounted his long-legged
young chestnut and was ready to start.
“Don’t forget Lucy expects you to tea, Charlotte,” he said as he settled
himself in his saddle.
“And don’t you forget what I told you,” replied Charlotte, sinking her
voice confidentially; “don’t mind her if she opens her mouth wide; it’ll
take less to shut it than ye’d think.”
Lambert nodded and rode after Francie, who, in compliance with the
wishes of the black mare, had hurried on towards the gate. The black
mare was a lady of character, well-mannered but firm, and the mere sit
of the saddle on her back told her that this was a case when it would be
well to take matters into her own control; she accordingly dragged as
much of the reins as she required from Francie’s helpless hands, and by
the time she had got on to the high road, had given her rider to
understand that her position was that of tenant at will.
They turned their backs on the town, and rode along the dazzling, dusty
road, that radiated all the heat of a blazing afternoon.
“I think he did you pretty well with that habit,” remarked Lambert
presently. “What’s the damage to be?”
“What do you think?” replied Francie gaily, answering one question with
another after the manner of her country.
“Ten?”
“Ah, go on! Where’d I get ten pounds? He said he’d only charge me six
because you recommended me, but I can tell him he’ll have to wait for
his money.”
“Why, are you hard up again?”
Francie looked up at him and laughed with unconcern that was not in the
least affected.
“Of course I am! Did you ever know me that I wasn’t?”
Lambert was silent for a moment or two, and half unconsciously his
thoughts ran back over the time, six years ago now, when he had first
met Francie. There had always been something exasperating to him in her
brilliant indifference to the serious things of life. Her high spirits
were as impenetrable as a coat of mail; her ignorance of the world was
at once sublime and enraging. She had not seemed in the least impressed
by the fact that he, whom up to this time she had known as merely a
visitor at her uncle’s house, a feature of the Lawn-Tennis tournament
week, and a person with whom to promenade Merrion Square while the band
was playing, was in reality a country gentleman, a J.P., and a man of
standing, who owned as good horses as anyone in the county. She even
seemed as impervious as ever to the pathos of his position in having
thrown himself and his good looks away upon a plain woman six or seven
years older than himself. All these things passed quickly through his
mind, as if they found an accustomed groove there, and mingled acidly
with the disturbing subconsciousness that the mare would inevitably come
home with a sore back if her rider did not sit straighter than she was
doing at present.
“Look here, Francie,” he said at last, with something of asperity, “it’s
all very fine to humbug now, but if you don’t take care you’ll find
yourself in the county court some fine day. It’s easier to get there
than you’d think,” he added gloomily, “and then there’ll be the devil to
pay, and nothing to pay him with; and what’ll you do then?”
“I’ll send for you to come and bail me out!” replied Francie without
hesitation, giving an unconsidered whack behind the saddle as she spoke.
The black mare at once showed her sense of the liberty by kicking up her
heels in a manner that lifted Francie a hand’s-breadth from her seat,
and shook her foot out of the stirrup. “Gracious!” she gasped, when she
had sufficiently recovered herself to speak; “what did he do? Did he
buck-jump? Oh, Mr. Lambert--” as the mare, satisfied with her protest,
broke into a sharp trot, “do stop him; I can’t get my foot into the
stirrup!”
Lambert, trotting serenely beside her on his tall chestnut, watched her
precarious bumpings for a minute or two with a grin, then he stretched
out a capable hand, and pulled the mare into a walk.
“Now, where would you be without me?” he inquired.
“Sitting on the road,” replied Francie. “I never felt such a horrid
rough thing--and look at Mrs. Lambert looking at me over the wall!
Weren’t you a cad that you wouldn’t stop him before?”
In the matter of exercise, Mrs. Lambert was one of those people who want
but little here below, nor want that little long. The tour of the two
acres that formed the demesne of Rosemount was generally her limit, and
any spare energy that remained to her after that perambulation was spent
in taking weeds out of the garden path with a lady-like cane-handled
spud. This implement was now in her gauntletted hand, and she waved it
feebly to the riders as they passed, while Muffy stood in front of her
and barked with asthmatic fury.
“Make Miss Fitzpatrick come in to tea on her way home, Roderick,” she
called, looking admiringly at the girl with kind eyes that held no spark
of jealousy of her beauty and youth. Mrs. Lambert was one of the women
who sink prematurely and unresistingly into the sloughs of middle-age.
For her there had been no intermediary period of anxious tracking of
grey hairs, of fevered energy in the playing of lawn-tennis and
rounders; she had seen, with a feeling too sluggish to be respected as
resignation, her complexion ascend the scale of colour from possible
pink to the full sunset flush that now burned in her cheeks and spanned
the sharp ridge of her nose; and she still, as she had always done,
bought her expensive Sunday bonnet as she would have bought a piece of
furniture, because it was handsome, not because it was becoming. The
garden hat which she now wore could not pretend to either of these
qualifications, and, as Francie looked at her, the contrast between her
and her husband was as conspicuous as even he could have wished.
Francie’s first remark, however, after they had passed by, seemed to
show that her point of view was not the same as his.
“Won’t she be very lonely there all the afternoon by herself?” she
asked, with a backward glance at the figure in the garden hat.
“Oh, not she!” said Lambert carelessly, “she has the dog, and she’ll
potter about there as happy as possible. She’s all right.” Then after a
pause in which the drift of Francie’s question probably presented itself
to him for the first time, “I wish everyone was as satisfied with their
life as she is.”
“How bad you are!” returned Francie, quite unmoved by the gloomy
sentimental roll of Mr. Lambert’s eyes. “I never heard a man talk such
nonsense in my life!”
“My dear child,” said Lambert, with paternal melancholy, “when you’re my
age--”
“Which I sha’n’t be for the next fifteen years--” interrupted Francie.
Mr. Lambert checked himself abruptly, and looked cross.
“Oh, all right! If you’re going to sit on me every time I open my mouth,
I’d better shut up.”
Francie with some difficulty brought the black mare beside the chestnut,
and put her hand for an instant on Lambert’s arm.
“Ah now, don’t be angry with me!” she said with a glance whose efficacy
she had often proved in similar cases; “you know I was only funning.”
“I am not in the least angry with you,” replied Lambert coldly, though
his eyes turned in spite of himself to her face.
“Oh, I know very well you’re angry with me,” rejoined Francie, with
unfeigned enjoyment of the situation; “your mustash always gets as black
as a coal when you’re angry.”
The adornment referred to twitched, but its owner said nothing.
“There now, you’re laughing!” continued Francie, “but it’s quite true; I
remember the first time I noticed that, was the time you brought Mrs.
Lambert up to town about her teeth, and you took places at the Gaiety
for the three of us--and oh! do you remember--” leaning back and
laughing whole-heartedly, “she couldn’t get her teeth in in time, and
you wanted her to go without any, and she wouldn’t, for fear she might
laugh at the pantomime, and I had promised to go to the Dalkey Band that
night with the Whittles, and then when you got up to our house and found
you’d got the three tickets for nothing, you were so mad that when I
came down into the parlour I declare I thought you’d been dyeing your
mustash! Aunt Tish said afterwards it was because your face got so
white, but _I_ knew it was because you were in such a passion.”
“Well, I didn’t like chucking away fifteen shillings a bit more than
anyone else would,” said Lambert.
“Ah, well, we made it up, d’ye remember?” said Francie, regarding him
with a laughing eye, in which there was a suspicion of sentiment; “and
after all, you were able to change the tickets to another night, and it
was ‘Pinafore,’ and you laughed at me so awfully, because I cried at the
part where the two lovers are saying good-bye to each other, and poor
Mrs. Lambert got her teeth in in a hurry to go with us, and she couldn’t
utter the whole night for fear they’d fall out.”
Perhaps the allusions to his wife’s false teeth had a subtly soothing
effect on Mr. Lambert. He never was averse to anything that showed that
other people were as conscious as he was of the disparity between his
own admirable personal equipment and that of Mrs. Lambert; it was
another admission of the great fact that he had thrown himself away. His
eyebrows and moustache became less truculent, he let himself down with
a complacent sarcasm on Francie’s method of holding her whip, and, as
they rode on, he permitted to himself the semi-proprietary enjoyment of
an agent in pointing out boundaries, and landmarks, and improvements.
They had ridden at first under a pale green arch of roadside trees, with
fields on either side full of buttercups and dog-daisies, a land of
pasture and sleek cattle, and neat stone walls. But in the second or
third mile the face of the country changed. The blue lake that had lain
in the distance like a long slab of _lapis lazuli_, was within two
fields of them now, moving drowsily in and out of the rocks, and over
the coarse gravel of its shore. The trees had dwindled to ragged hazel
and thorn bushes; the fat cows of the comfortable farms round Lismoyle
were replaced by lean, dishevelled goats, and shelves and flags of grey
limestone began to contest the right of the soil with the thin grass and
the wiry brushwood. We have said grey limestone, but that hard-worked
adjective cannot at all express the cold, pure blueness that these
boulders take, under the sky of summer. Some word must yet be coined in
which neither blue nor lilac shall have the supremacy, and in which the
steely purple of a pigeon’s breast shall not be forgotten.
The rock was everywhere. Even the hazels were at last squeezed out of
existence, and inland, over the slowly swelling hills, it lay like the
pavement of some giant city, that had been jarred from its symmetry by
an earthquake. A mile away, on the further side of this iron belt, a
clump of trees rose conspicuously by the lake side, round a two-storied
white house, and towards these trees the road wound its sinuous way. The
grass began to show in larger and larger patches between the rocks, and
the indomitable hazels crept again out of the crannies, and raised their
low canopies over the heads of the browsing sheep and goats. A stream,
brown with turf-mould, and fierce with battles with the boulders, made a
boundary between the stony wilderness and the dark green pastures of
Gurthnamuckla. It dashed under a high-backed little bridge with such
excitement that the black mare, for all her intelligence, curved her
neck, and sidled away from the parapet towards Lambert’s horse.
Just beyond the bridge, a repulsive-looking old man was sitting on a
heap of stones, turning over the contents of a dirty linen pouch. Beside
him were an empty milk-can, and a black-and-white dog which had begun by
trying to be a collie, and had relapsed into an indifferent attempt at a
grey-hound. It greeted the riders with the usual volley of barking, and
its owner let fall some of the coppers that he was counting over, in his
haste to strike at it with the long stick that was lying beside him.
“Have done! Sailor! Blasht yer sowl! Have done!” then, with honeyed
obsequiousness, “yer honour’s welcome, Mr. Lambert.”
“Is Miss Duffy in the house?” asked Lambert.
“She is, she is, yer honour,” he answered, in the nasal mumble peculiar
to his class, getting up and beginning to shuffle after the horses; “but
what young lady is this at all? Isn’t she very grand, God bless her!”
“She’s Miss Fitzpatrick, Miss Mullen’s cousin, Billy,” answered Lambert
graciously; approbation could not come from a source too low for him to
be susceptible to it.
The old man came up beside Francie, and, clutching the skirt of her
habit, blinked at her with sly and swimming eyes.
“Fitzpatrick is it? Begob I knew her grannema well; she was a fine
hearty woman, the Lord have mercy on her! And she never seen me without
she’d give me a shixpence or maybe a shillin’.”
Francie was skilled in the repulse of the Dublin beggar, but this
ancestral precedent was something for which she was not prepared. The
clutch tightened on her habit and the disgusting old face almost touched
it, as Billy pressed close to her, mouthing out incomprehensible
blessings and entreaties. She felt afraid of his red eyes and clawing
fingers, and she turned helplessly to Lambert.
“Here, be off now, Billy, you old fool!” he said; “we’ve had enough of
you. Run and open the gate.”
The farm-house, with its clump of trees, was close to them, and its
drooping iron entrance-gate shrieked resentfully as the old man dragged
it open.