Christopher Dysart was a person about whom Lismoyle and its
neighbourhood had not been able to come to a satisfactory conclusion,
unless, indeed, that conclusion can be called satisfactory which
admitted him to be a disappointment. From the time that, as a shy, plain
little boy he first went to school, and, after the habit of boys, ceased
to exist except in theory and holidays, a steady undercurrent of
interest had always set about him. His mother was so charming, and his
father so delicate, and he himself so conveniently contemporary with so
many daughters, that although the occasional glimpses vouchsafed of him
during his Winchester and Oxford career were as discouraging as they
were brief, it was confidently expected that he would emerge from his
boyish shyness when he came to take his proper place in the county and
settle down at Bruff. Thus Lady Eyrefield, and Mrs. Waller, and their
like, the careful mothers of those contemporaneous daughters, and thus
also, after their kind, the lesser ladies of Lismoyle.
But though Christopher was now seven and twenty he seemed as far from
“taking his place in the county” as he had ever been. His mother’s
friends had no particular fault to find with him; that was a prominent
feature in their dissatisfaction. He was quite good-looking enough for
an eldest son, and his politeness to their daughters left them nothing
to complain of except the discouraging fact that it was exceeded by his
politeness to themselves. His readiness to talk when occasion demanded
was undisputed, but his real or pretended dulness in those matters of
local interest, which no one except an outsider calls gossip, made
conversation with him a hollow and heartless affair. One of his most
exasperating points was that he could not be referred to any known type.
He was “between the sizes,” as shopmen say of gloves. He was not smart
and aggressive enough for the soldiering type, nor sporting enough for
the country gentleman, but neither had he the docility and attentiveness
of the ideal curate; he could not even be lightly disposed of as an
eccentricity, which would have been some sort of consolation.
“If I ever could have imagined that Isabel Dysart’s son would have
turned out like this,” said the Dowager Lady Eyrefield, in a moment of
bitterness, “I should not have given myself the trouble of writing to
Castlemore about taking him out as his secretary. I thought all those
functions and dinner parties would have done something for him, but
though they polished up his manners, and improved that most painful and
unfortunate stutter, he’s at heart just as much a stick as ever.”
Lismoyle was, according to its lights, equally nonplussed. Mrs. Baker
had, indeed, suggested that it was sending him to these grand English
universities, instead of to Trinity College, Dublin, that had taken the
fun out of him in the first going off, and what finished him was going
out to those Barbadoes, with all the blacks bowing down to him, and his
liver growing the size of I don’t know what with the heat. Mrs. Corkran,
the widow of the late rector of Lismoyle, had, however, rejoined that
she had always found Mr. Dysart a most humble-minded young man on the
occasions when she had met him at his cousin Mrs. Gascogne’s, and by no
means puffed up with his rank or learning. This proposition Mrs. Baker
had not attempted to dispute, but none the less she had felt it to be
beside the point. She had not found that Christopher’s learning had
disposed him to come to her tennis parties, and she did not feel
humility to be a virtue that graced a young man of property. Certainly,
in spite of his humility, she could not venture to take him to task for
his neglect of her entertainments as she could Mr. Hawkins; but then it
is still more certain that Christopher would not, as Mr. Hawkins had
often done, sit down before her, as before a walled town, and so
skilfully entreat her that in five minutes all would have been forgiven
and forgotten.
It was, perhaps, an additional point of aggravation that, dull and
unprofitable though he was considered to be, Christopher had amusements
of his own in which the neighbourhood had no part. Since he had returned
from the West Indies, his three-ton cutter with the big Una sail had
become one of the features of the lake, but though a red parasol was
often picturesquely visible above the gunwale, the knowledge that it
sheltered his sister deprived it of the almost painful interest that it
might otherwise have had, and at the same time gave point to a snub that
was unintentionally effective and comprehensive. There were many sunny
mornings on which Mr. Dysart’s camera occupied commanding positions in
the town, or its outskirts, while its owner photographed groups of old
women and donkeys, regardless of the fact that Miss Kathleen Baker, in
her most becoming hat, had taken her younger sister from the schoolroom
to play a showy game of lawn-tennis in the garden in front of her
father’s villa, or was, with Arcadian industry, cutting buds off the
roses that dropped their pink petals over the low wall on to the road.
It was quite inexplicable that the photographer should pack up his
camera and walk home without taking advantage of this artistic
opportunity beyond a civil lift of his cap; and at such times Miss Baker
would re-enter the villa with a feeling of contempt for Mr. Dysart that
was almost too deep for words.
She might have been partially consoled had she known that on a June
morning not long after the latest of these repulses, her feelings were
fully shared by the person whom, for the last two Sundays, she had
looked at in the Dysart pew with a respectful dislike that implied the
highest compliment in her power. Miss Evelyn Hope-Drummond stood at the
bow-window of the Bruff drawing-room and looked out over the gravelled
terrace, across the flower-garden and the sunk fence, to the clump of
horse chestnuts by the lake-side. Beyond these the cattle were standing
knee-deep in the water, and on the flat margin a pair of legs in white
flannel trousers was all that the guest, whom his mother delighted to
honour, could see of Christopher Dysart. The remainder of him wrestled
beneath a black velvet pall with the helplessly wilful legs of his
camera, and all his mind, as Miss Hope-Drummond well knew, was
concentrated upon cows. Her first visit to Ireland was proving less
amusing than she had expected, she thought, and as she watched
Christopher she wished fervently that she had not offered to carry any
of his horrid things across the park for him. In the flower-garden below
the terrace she could see Lady Dysart and Pamela in deep consultation
over an infirm rose-tree; a wheelbarrow full of pans of seedlings
sufficiently indicated what their occupation would be for the rest of
the morning, and she felt it was of a piece with the absurdities of
Irish life that the ladies of the house should enjoy doing the
gardener’s work for him. The strong scent of heated Gloire de Dijon
roses came through the window, and suggested to her how well one of them
would suit with her fawn-coloured Redfern gown, and she leaned out to
pick a beautiful bud that was swaying in the sun just within reach.
“Ha--a--ah! I see ye, missy! Stop picking my flowers! Push, James
Canavan, you devil, you! Push!”
A bath-chair, occupied by an old man in a tall hat, and pushed by a man
also in a tall hat, had suddenly turned the corner of the house, and
Miss Hope-Drummond drew back precipitately to avoid the uplifted
walking-stick of Sir Benjamin Dysart.
“Oh, fie, for shame, Sir Benjamin!” exclaimed the man who had been
addressed as James Canavan. “Pray, cull the rose, miss,” he continued,
with a flourish of his hand; “sweets to the sweet!”
Sir Benjamin aimed a backward stroke with his oak stick at his
attendant, a stroke in which long practice had failed to make him
perfect, and in the exchange of further amenities the party passed out
of sight. This was not Miss Hope-Drummond’s first meeting with her host.
His bath-chair had daily, as it seemed to her, lain in wait in the
shrubberies, to cause terror to the solitary, and discomfiture to
_tête-à-têtes_; and on one morning he had stealthily protruded the crook
of his stick from the door of his room as she went by, and all but
hooked her round the ankle with it.
“Really, it is disgraceful that he is not locked up,” she said to
herself crossly, as she gathered the contested bud, and sat down to
write letters; “but in Ireland no one seems to think anything of
anything!”
It was very hot down in the garden where Lady Dysart and Pamela were at
work; Lady Dysart kneeling in the inadequate shade of a parasol, whose
handle she had propped among the pans in the wheelbarrow, and Pamela
weeding a flower-bed a few yards away. It was altogether a scene worthy
in its domestic simplicity of the Fairchild Family, only that instead of
Mr. Fairchild, “stretched on the grass at a little distance with his
book,” a bronze-coloured dachshund lay roasting his long side in the
sun; and also that Lady Dysart, having mistaken the young chickweed in a
seedling pan for the asters that should have been there, was filling her
bed symmetrically with the former, an imbecility that Mrs. Sherwood
would never have permitted in a parent. The mother and daughter lifted
their heads at the sound of the conflict on the terrace.
“Papa will frighten Evelyn into a fit,” observed Pamela, rubbing a midge
off her nose with an earthy gardening glove; “I wish James Canavan could
be induced to keep him away from the house.”
“It’s all right, dear,” said Lady Dysart, panting a little as she
straightened her back and surveyed her rows of chickweed; “Christopher
is with her, and you know he never notices anyone else when Christopher
is there.”
Lady Dysart had in her youth married, with a little judicious coercion,
a man thirty years older than herself, and after a long and, on the
whole, extremely unpleasant period of matrimony, she was now enjoying a
species of Indian summer, dating from six years back, when Christopher’s
coming of age and the tenants’ rejoicings thereat, had caused such a
paroxysm of apoplectic jealousy on the part of Christopher’s father as,
combining with the heat of the day, had brought on a “stroke.” Since
then the bath-chair and James Canavan had mercifully intervened between
him and the rest of the world, and his offspring were now able to fly
before him with a frankness and success impossible in the old days.
Pamela did not answer her mother at once.
“Do you know I’m afraid Christopher isn’t with her,” she said, looking
both guilty and perturbed.
Lady Dysart groaned aloud.
“Why, where is he?” she demanded. “I left Evelyn helping him to paste in
photographs after breakfast; I thought that would have been nice
occupation for them for at least two hours; but as for Christopher--”
she continued, her voice deepening to declamation, “it is quite hopeless
to expect anything from him. I should rather trust Garry to entertain
anyone. The day _he_ took her out in the boat they weren’t in till six
o’clock!”
“That was because Garry ran the punt on the shallow, and they had to
wade ashore and walk all the way round.”
“That has nothing to say to it; at all events they had something to talk
about when they came back, which is more than Christopher has when he
has been out sailing. It is _most_ disheartening; I ask nice girls to
the house, but I might just as well ask nice boys--Oh, of course, yes--”
in answer to a protest from her daughter; “he _talks_ to them; but you
know quite well what I mean.”
This complaint was not the first indication of Lady Dysart’s sentiments
about this curious son whom she had produced. She was a clever woman, a
renowned solver of the acrostics in her society paper, and a holder of
strong opinions as to the prophetic meaning of the Pyramids; but
Christopher was an acrostic in a strange language, an enigma beyond her
sphere. She had a vague but rooted feeling that young men were normally
in love with somebody, or at least pretending to be so; it was, of
course, an excellent thing that Christopher did not lose his heart to
the wrong people, but she would probably have preferred the agitation of
watching his progress through the most alarming flirtations to the
security that deprived conversation with other mothers of much of its
legitimate charm.
“Well, there was Miss Fetherstone,” began Pamela after a moment of
obvious consideration.
“Miss Fetherstone!” echoed Lady Dysart in her richest contralto, fixing
eyes of solemn reproach upon her daughter, “do you suppose that for one
instant I thought there was anything in that? No baby, no _idiot_ baby,
could have believed in it!”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Pamela; “I think you and Mrs. Waller believed
in it, at least I remember you both settling what your wedding presents
were to be!”
“_I_ never said a word about wedding presents, it was Mrs. Waller! Of
course she was anxious about her own niece, just as _anybody_ would have
been under the circumstances.” Lady Dysart here became aware of
something in Pamela’s expression that made her add hurriedly, “Not that
_I_ ever had the faintest shadow of belief in it. Too well do I know
Christopher’s platonic philanderings; and you see the affair turned out
just as I said it would.”
Pamela refrained from pursuing her advantage.
“If you like I’ll make him come with Evelyn and me to the choir practice
this afternoon,” she said after a pause. “Of course he’ll hate it, poor
boy, especially as Miss Mullen wrote to me the other day and asked us to
come to tea after it was over.”
“Oh, yes!” said Lady Dysart with sudden interest and forgetfulness of
her recent contention, “and you will see the new importation whom we met
with Mr. Lambert the other day. What a charming young creature she
looked! ‘The fair one with the golden locks’ was the only description
for her! And yet that miserable Christopher will only say that she is
‘chocolate-boxey!’ Oh! I have no patience with Christopher’s
affectation!” she ended, rising from her knees and brushing the earth
from her extensive lap with a gesture of annoyance. She began to realise
that the sun was hot and luncheon late, and it was at this unpropitious
moment that Pamela, having finished the flower-bed she had been
weeding, approached the scene of her mother’s labours.
“Mamma,” she said faintly, “you have planted the whole bed with
chickweed!”