It had been hard work pulling the punt across from Bruff to Lismoyle
with two well-grown young women sitting in the stern; it had been a hot
walk up from the landing-place to the church, but worse than these,
transcendently worse, in that it involved the suffering of the mind as
well as the body, was the choir practice. Christopher’s long nose
drooped despondingly over his Irish church hymnal, and his long back had
a disconsolate hoop in it as he leaned it against the wall in his place
in the backmost row of the choir benches. The chants had been long and
wearisome, and the hymns were proving themselves equally enduring.
Christopher was not eminently musical or conspicuously religious, and he
regarded with a kind of dismal respect and surprise the fervour in
Pamela’s pure profile as she turned to Mrs. Gascogne and suggested that
the hymn they had just gone through twice should be sung over again. He
supposed it was because she had High Church tendencies that she was able
to stand this sort of thing, and his mind drifted into abstract
speculations as to how people could be as good as Pamela was and live.
In the interval before the last hymn he derived a temporary solace from
finding his own name inscribed in dull red characters in the leaf of his
hymn-book, with, underneath in the same colour, the fateful inscription,
“Written in blood by Garrett Dysart.” The thought of his younger brother
utilising pleasantly a cut finger and the long minutes of the
archdeacon’s sermon, had for the moment inspired Christopher with a
sympathetic amusement, but he had relapsed into his pristine gloom. He
knew the hymn perfectly well by this time, and his inoffensive tenor
joined mechanically with the other voices, while his eyes roamed idly
over the two rows of people in front of him. There was nothing
suggestive of ethereal devotion about Pamela’s neighbours. Miss
Mullen’s heaving shoulders and extended jaw spoke of nothing but her
determination to out-scream everyone else; Miss Hope-Drummond and the
curate, on the bench in front of him, were singing primly out of the
same hymn-book, the curate obviously frightened, Miss Hope-Drummond as
obviously disgusted. The Misses Beattie were furtively eyeing Miss
Hope-Drummond’s costume; Miss Kathleen Baker was openly eyeing the
curate, whose hymn-book she had been wont to share at happier choir
practices, and Miss Fitzpatrick, seated at the end of the row, was
watching from the gallery window with unaffected interest the progress
of the usual weekly hostilities between Pamela’s dachshund and the
sexton’s cat, and was not even pretending to occupy herself with the
business in hand. Christopher’s eyes rested on her appraisingly, with
the minute observation of short sight, fortified by an eyeglass, and was
aware of a small head with a fluffy halo of conventionally golden hair,
a straight and slender neck, and an appleblossom curve of cheek; he
found himself wishing that she would turn a little further round.
The hymn had seven verses, and Pamela and Mrs. Gascogne were going
inexorably through them all; the school-master and schoolmistress, an
estimable couple, sole prop of the choir on wet Sundays, were braying
brazenly beside him, and this was only the second hymn. Christopher’s D
sharp melted into a yawn, and before he could screen it with his
hymn-book, Miss Fitzpatrick looked round and caught him in the act. A
suppressed giggle and a quick lift of the eyebrows instantly conveyed to
him that his sentiments were comprehended and sympathised with, and he
as instantly was conscious that Miss Mullen was following the direction
of her niece’s eye. Lady Dysart’s children did not share her taste for
Miss Mullen; Christopher vaguely felt some offensive flavour in the
sharp smiling glance in which she included him and Francie, and an
unexplainable sequence of thought made him suddenly decide that her
niece was as second-rate as might have been expected.
Never had the choir dragged so hopelessly; never had Mrs. Gascogne and
Pamela compelled their victims to deal with so many and difficult tunes,
and never at any previous choir practice had Christopher registered so
serious a vow that under no pretext whatever should Pamela entice him
there again. They were all sitting down now, while the leaders consulted
together about the Kyrie, and the gallery cushions slowly turned to
stone in their well-remembered manner. Christopher’s ideas of
church-going were inseparably bound up with those old gallery cushions.
He had sat upon them ever since, as a small boy, he had chirped a treble
beside his governess, and he knew every knob in their anatomy. There is
something blighting to the devotional tendencies in the atmosphere of a
gallery. He had often formulated this theory for his own exculpation,
lying flat on his back in a punt in some shady backwater, with the
Oxford church bells reminding him reproachfully of Lismoyle Sundays, and
of Pamela,--the faithful, conscientious Pamela,--whipping up the pony to
get to church before the bell stopped. Now, after a couple of months’
renewed acquaintance with the choir, the theory had hardened into a
tedious truism, and when at last Christopher’s long legs were free to
carry him down the steep stairs, the malign influence of the gallery had
brought their owner to the verge of free thought.
He did not know how it had happened or by whose disposition of the
forces it had been brought about, but when Miss Mullen’s tea-party
detached itself from the other members of the choir at the churchyard
gate, Pamela and Miss Hope-Drummond were walking on either side of their
hostess, and he was behind with Miss Fitzpatrick.
“You don’t appear very fond of hymns, Mr. Dysart,” began Francie at
once, in the pert Dublin accent that, rightly or wrongly, gives the idea
of familiarity.
“People aren’t supposed to look about them in church,” replied
Christopher with the peculiar suavity which, combined with his
disconcerting infirmity of pausing before he spoke, had often baffled
the young ladies of Barbadoes, and had acquired for him the reputation,
perhaps not wholly undeserved, of being a prig.
“Oh, I daresay!” said Francie, “I suppose that’s why you sit in the back
seat, that no one’ll see you doing it!”
There was a directness about this that Lismoyle would not have ventured
on, and Christopher looked down at his companion with an increase of
interest.
“No; I sit there because I can go to sleep.”
“Well, and do you? and who do you get to wake you?”--her quick voice
treading sharply on the heels of his quiet one. “I used always to have
to sit beside Uncle Robert in church to pinch him at the end of the
sermon.”
“_I_ find it very hard to wake at the end of the sermon too,” remarked
Christopher, with an experimental curiosity to see what Miss Mullen’s
unexpected cousin would say next.
“Do y’ indeed?” said Francie, flashing a look at him of instant
comprehension and complete _sang froid_. “I’ll lend the schoolmistress a
hat-pin if you like! What on earth makes men so sleepy in church I don’t
know,” she continued; “at our church in Dublin I used to be looking at
them. All the gentlemen sit in the corner seat next the aisle, because
they’re the most comfortable, y’ know, and from the minute the clergyman
gives out the text--” she made a little gesture with her hand, showing
thereby that half the buttons were off her glove--“they’re snoring!”
How young she was, and how pretty, and how inexpressibly vulgar!
Christopher thought all these things in turn, while he did what in him
lay to continue the conversation in the manner expected of him. The
effort was perhaps not very successful, as, after a few minutes, it was
evident that Francie was losing her first freedom of discourse, and was
casting about for topics more appropriate to what she had heard of Mr.
Dysart’s mental and literary standard.
“I hear you’re a great photographer, Mr. Dysart,” she began. “Miss
Mullen says you promised to take a picture of her and her cats, and she
was telling me to remind you of it. Isn’t it awfully clever of you to be
able to do it?”
To this form of question reply is difficult, especially when it is put
with all the good faith of complete ignorance. Christopher evaded the
imbecilities of direct response.
“I shall think myself awfully clever if I photograph the cats,” he said.
“Clever!” she caught him up with a little shriek of laughter. “I can
tell you you’ll want to be clever! Are you able to photograph up the
chimney or under Norry’s bed? for that’s where they always run when a
man comes into the house, and if you try to stop them they’d claw the
face off you! Oh, they’re terrors!”
“It’s very good of you to tell me all this in time,” Christopher said,
with a rather absent laugh. He was listening to Miss Mullen’s voice, and
realising, for the first time, what it would be to live under the same
roof with her and her cats; and yet this girl seemed quite light-hearted
and happy. “Perhaps, on the whole, I’d better stay away?” he said,
looking at her, and feeling in the sudden causeless way in which often
the soundest conclusions are arrived at, how vast was the chasm between
her ideal of life and his own, and linking with the feeling a pity that
would have been self-sufficient if it had not also been perfectly
simple.
“Ah! don’t say you won’t come and take the cats!” Francie exclaimed.
They reached the Tally Ho gate as she spoke, and the others were only a
step or two in front of them. Charlotte looked over her shoulder with a
benign smile.
“What’s this I hear about taking my cats?” she said jovially. “You’re
welcome to everything in my house, Mr. Dysart, but I’ll set the police
on you if you take my poor cats!”
“Oh, but I assure you--”
“He’s only going to photo them,” said Christopher and Francie together.
“Do you hear them, Miss Dysart?” continued Charlotte, fumbling for her
latch key, “conspiring together to rob a poor lone woman of her only
live stock!”
She opened the door, and as her visitors entered the hall they caught a
glance of Susan’s large, stern countenance regarding them with
concentrated suspicion through the rails of the staircase.
“My beauty-boy!” shouted his mistress, as he vanished upstairs. “Steal
him if you can, Mr. Dysart!”
Miss Hope-Drummond looked rather more uninterested than is usual in
polite society. When she had left the hammock, slung in the shade beside
the tennis-ground at Bruff, it had not been to share Mr. Corkran’s
hymn-book; still less had it been to walk from the church to Tally Ho
between Pamela and a woman whom, from having regarded as merely
_outrée_ and incomprehensible, she had now come to look upon as rather
impertinent. Irish society was intolerably mixed, she decided, as she
sniffed the various odours of the Tally Ho hall, and, with some
sub-connection of ideas, made up her mind that photography was a
detestable and silly pursuit for men. While these thoughts were passing
beneath her accurately curled fringe, Miss Mullen opened the
drawing-room door, and, as they walked in, a short young man in light
grey clothes arose from the most comfortable chair to greet them.
There was surprise and disfavour in Miss Mullen’s eye as she extended
her hand to him.
“This is an unexpected pleasure, Mr. Hawkins,” she said.
“Yes,” answered Mr. Hawkins cheerfully, taking the hand and doing his
best to shake it at the height prescribed by existing fashion, “I
thought it would be; Miss Fitzpatrick asked me to come in this
afternoon; didn’t you?” addressing himself to Francie. “I got rather a
nasty jar when I heard you were all out, but I thought I’d wait for a
bit. I knew Miss Dysart always gives ’em fits at the choir practice. All
the same, you know, I should have begun to eat the cake if you hadn’t
come in.”
The round table in the middle of the room was spread, in Louisa’s
accustomed fashion, as if for breakfast, and in the centre was placed a
cake, coldly decked in the silver paper trappings that it had long worn
in the grocer’s window.
“’Twas well for you you didn’t!” said Francie, with, as it seemed to
Christopher, a most familiar and challenging laugh.
“Why?” inquired Hawkins, looking at her with a responsive eye. “What
would you have done?”
“Plenty,” returned Francie unhesitatingly; “enough to make you sorry
anyway!”
Mr. Hawkins looked delighted, and was opening his mouth for a suitable
rejoinder, when Miss Mullen struck in sharply:
“Francie, go tell Louisa that I suppose she expects us to stir our tea
with our fingers, for there’s not a spoon on the table.”
“Oh, let me go,” said Hawkins, springing to open the door; “I know
Louisa; she was very kind to me just now. She hunted all the cats out of
the room.” Francie was already in the hall, and he followed her.
The search for Louisa was lengthy, involving much calling for her by
Francie, with falsetto imitations by Mr. Hawkins, and finally a pause,
during which it might be presumed that the pantry was being explored.
Pamela brought her chair nearer to Miss Mullen, who had begun wrathfully
to stir her tea with the sugar-tongs, and entered upon a soothing line
of questions as to the health and number of the cats; and Christopher,
having cut the grocer’s cake, and found that it was the usual
conglomerate of tallow, saw-dust, bad eggs, and gravel, devoted himself
to thick bread and butter, and to conversation with Miss Hope-Drummond.
The period of second cups was approaching, when laughter, and a jingle
of falling silver in the hall, told that the search for Louisa was
concluded, and Francie and Mr. Hawkins re-entered the drawing-room, the
latter endeavouring, not unsuccessfully, to play the bones with four of
Charlotte’s best electro-plated teaspoons, while his brown boots moved
in the furtive rhythm of an imaginary break-down. Miss Mullen did not
even raise her eyes, and Christopher and Miss Hope-Drummond continued
their conversation unmoved; only Pamela acknowledged the histrionic
intention with a sympathetic but nervous smile. Pamela’s finger was
always instinctively on the pulse of the person to whom she was talking,
and she knew better than either Francie or Hawkins that they were in
disgrace.
“I’d be obliged to you for those teaspoons, Mr. Hawkins, when you’ve
quite done with them,” said Charlotte, with an ugly look at the chief
offender’s self-satisfied countenance; “it’s a good thing no one except
myself takes sugar in their tea.”
“We couldn’t help it,” replied Mr. Hawkins, unabashed; “Louisa was out
for a walk with her young man, and Miss Fitzpatrick and I had to polish
up the teaspoons ourselves.”
Charlotte received this explanation and the teaspoons in silence as she
poured out the delinquents’ tea; there were moments when she permitted
herself the satisfaction of showing disapproval if she felt it. Francie
accepted her cousin’s displeasure philosophically, only betraying her
sense of the situation by the expressive eye which she turned towards
her companion in disgrace over the rim of her tea-cup. But Mr. Hawkins
rose to the occasion. He gulped his tepid and bitter cup of tea with
every appearance of enjoyment, and having arranged his small moustache
with a silk handkerchief, addressed himself undauntedly to Miss Mullen.
“Do you know, I don’t believe you have ever been out in our tea-kettle,
Miss Mullen. Captain Cursiter and I are feeling very hurt about it.”
“If you mean by ‘tea-kettle’ that steamboat thing that I’ve seen going
about the lake,” replied Charlotte, making an effort to resume her first
attitude of suave and unruffled hospitality, and at the same time to
administer needed correction to Mr. Hawkins, “I certainly have not. I
have always been taught that it was manners to wait till you’re asked.”
“I quite agree with you, Miss Mullen,” struck in Pamela; “we also
thought that for a long time, but we had to give it up in the end and
ask ourselves! You are much more honoured than we were.”
“Oh, I say, Miss Dysart, you know it was only our grovelling humility,”
expostulated Hawkins, “and you always said it dirtied your frock and
spoiled the poetry of the lake. You quite put us off taking anybody out.
But we’ve pulled ourselves together now, Miss Mullen, and if you and
Miss Fitzpatrick will fix an afternoon to go down the lake, perhaps if
Miss Dysart says she’s sorry we’ll let her come too, and even, if she’s
very good, bring whoever she likes with her.”
Mr. Hawkins’ manner towards ladies had precisely that tone of
self-complacent gallantry that Lady Dysart felt to be so signally
lacking in her own son, and it was not without its effect even upon
Charlotte. It is possible had she been aware that this special
compliment to her had been arranged during the polishing of the
teaspoons, it might have lost some of its value; but the thought of
steaming forth with the Bruff party and “th’ officers,” under the very
noses of the Lismoyle matrons, was the only point of view that presented
itself to her.
“Well, I’ll give you no answer till I get Mr. Dysart’s opinion. He’s the
only one of you that knows the lake,” she said more graciously. “If
_you_ say the steamboat is safe, Mr. Dysart, and you’ll come and see
we’re not drowned by these harum-scarum soldiers, I’ve no objection to
going.”
Further discussion was interrupted by a rush and a scurry on the gravel
of the garden path, and a flying ball of fur dashed up the outside of
the window, the upper half of which was open, and suddenly realising its
safety, poised itself on the sash, and crooned and spat with a collected
fury at Mr. Hawkins’ bull terrier, who leaped unavailingly below.
“Oh! me poor darling Bruffy!” screamed Miss Mullen, springing up and
upsetting her cup of tea; “she’ll be killed! Call off your dog, Mr.
Hawkins!”
As if in answer to her call, a tall figure darkened the window, and Mr.
Lambert pushed Mrs. Bruff into the room with the handle of his
walking-stick.
“Hullo, Charlotte! Isn’t that Hawkins’ dog?” he began, putting his head
in at the window; then, with a sudden change of manner as he caught
sight of Miss Mullen’s guests, “oh--I had no idea you had anyone here,”
he said, taking off his hat to as much of Pamela and Miss Hope-Drummond
as was not hidden by Charlotte’s bulky person, “I only thought I’d call
round and see if Francie would like to come out for a row before
dinner.”