Innishochery Island lay on the water like a great green bouquet, with a
narrow grey lace edging of stony beach. From the lake it seemed that the
foliage stood in a solid impenetrable mass, and that nothing but the
innumerable wood-pigeons could hope to gain its inner recesses; even the
space of grass which, at the side of the landing-place, drove a slender
wedge up among the trees, had still the moss-grown stumps upon it that
told it had been recovered by force from the possession of the tall
pines and thick hazel and birch scrub. The end of the wedge narrowed
into a thread of a path which wound its briary way among the trees with
such sinuous vagueness, and such indifference to branches overhead and
rocks underfoot, that to follow it was both an act of faith and a
penance. Near the middle of the island it was interrupted by a brook
that slipped along whispering to itself through the silence of the wood,
and though the path made a poor shift to maintain its continuity with
stepping-stones, it expired a few paces farther on in the bracken of a
little glade.
It was a glade that had in some elfish way acquired an expression of
extremest old age. The moss grew deep in the grass, lay deep on the
rocks; stunted birch-trees encircled it with pale twisted arms hoary
with lichen, and, at the farther end of it, a grey ruined chapel,
standing over the pool that was the birthplace of the stream, fulfilled
the last requirement of romance. On this hot summer afternoon the glade
had more than ever its air of tranced meditation upon other days and
superiority to the outer world, lulled in its sovereignty of the island
by the monotone of humming insects, while on the topmost stone of the
chapel a magpie gabbled and cackled like a court jester. Christopher
thought, as he sat by the pool smoking a cigarette, that he had done
well in staying behind under the pretence of photographing the yacht
from the landing-place, and thus eluding the rest of the party. He was
only intermittently unsociable, but he had always had a taste for his
own society, and, as he said to himself, he had been going strong all
the morning, and the time had come for solitude and tobacco.
He was a young man of a reflective turn, and had artistic aspirations
which, had he been of a hardier nature, would probably have taken him
further than photography. But Christopher’s temperament held one or two
things unusual in the amateur. He had the saving, or perhaps fatal power
of seeing his own handiwork with as unflattering an eye as he saw other
people’s. He had no confidence in anything about himself except his
critical ability, and as he did not satisfy that, his tentative essays
in painting died an early death. It was the same with everything else.
His fastidious dislike of doing a thing indifferently was probably a
form of conceit, and though it was a higher form than the common vanity
whose geese are all swans, it brought about in him a kind of deadlock.
His relations thought him extremely clever, on the strength of his
university career and his intellectual fastidiousness, and he himself
was aware that he was clever, and cared very little for the knowledge.
Half the people in the world were clever nowadays, he said to himself
with indolent irritability, but genius was another affair; and, having
torn up his latest efforts in water-colour and verse, he bought a
camera, and betook himself to the more attainable perfection of
photography.
It was delightful to lie here with the delicate cigarette smoke keeping
the flies at bay, and the grasshoppers whirring away in the grass, like
fairy sewing-machines, and with the soothing knowledge that the others
had been through the glade, had presumably done the ruin thoroughly, and
were now cutting their boots to pieces on the water-fretted limestone
rocks as they scrambled round from the shore to the landing-place. This
small venerable wood, and the boulders that had lain about the glade
through sleepy centuries till the moss had smothered their outlines,
brought to Christopher’s mind the enchanted country through which King
Arthur’s knights rode; and he lay there mouthing to himself fragments of
half-remembered verse, and wondering at the chance that had reserved for
him this backwater in a day of otherwise dubious enjoyment. He even
found himself piecing together a rhyme or two on his own account; but,
as is often the case, inspiration was paralysed by the overwhelming
fulness of the reality; the fifth line refused to express his idea, and
the interruption of lyric emotion caused by the making and lighting of
a fresh cigarette proved fatal to the prospects of the sonnet. He felt
disgusted with himself and his own futility. When he had been at Oxford
not thus had the springs of inspiration ceased to flow. He had begun to
pass the period of water-colours then, but not the period when ideas are
as plenty and as full of novelty as leaves in spring, and the knowledge
has not yet come that they, like the leaves, are old as the world
itself.
For the past three or four years the social exigencies of Government
House life had not proved conducive to fervour of any kind, and now,
while he was dawdling away his time at Bruff, in the uninterested
expectation of another appointment, he found that he not only could not
write, but that he seemed to have lost the wish to try.
“I suppose I am sinking into the usual bucolic stupor,” he said to
himself, as he abandoned the search for the vagrant rhyme. “If I only
could read the _Field_, and had a more spontaneous habit of cursing, I
should be an ideal country gentleman.”
He crumpled into his pocket again the envelope on the back of which he
had been scribbling, and told himself that it was more philosophic and
more simple to enjoy things in the homely, pre-historic manner, without
trying to express them elaborately for the benefit of others. He was
intellectually effete, and what made his effeteness more hopeless was
that he recognised it himself. “I am perfectly happy if I let myself
alone,” was the sum of his reflections. “They gave me a little more
culture than I could hold, and it ran over the edge at first. Now I
think I’m just about sufficiently up in the bottle for Lismoyle form.”
He tilted his straw hat over his nose, shut his eyes, and, leaning back,
soon felt the delicious fusion into his brain of the surrounding hum and
soft movement that tells of the coming of out-of-door summer sleep.
It is deplorable to think of the figure Christopher must cut in the eyes
of those whose robuster taste demands in a young man some more potent
and heroic qualities, a gentlemanly hardihood in language and liquor, an
interesting suggestion of moral obliquity, or, at least, some hereditary
vice on which the character may make shipwreck with magnificent
helplessness. Christopher, with his preference for his sister’s
society, and his lack of interest in the majority of manly occupations,
from hunting to music halls, has small claim to respect or admiration.
The invertebrateness of his character seemed to be expressed in his
attitude, as he lay, supine, under the birch trees, with the grass
making a luxurious couch for his lazy limbs, and the faint breeze just
stirring about him. His sleep was not deep enough to still the breath of
summer in his ears, but it had quieted the jabber of the magpie to a
distant purring, and he was fast falling into the abyss of
unconsciousness, when a gentle, regular sound made itself felt, the fall
of a footstep and the brushing of a skirt through the grass. He lay very
still, and cherished an ungenial hope that the white-stemmed birches
might mercifully screen him from the invader. The step came nearer, and
something in its solidity and determination gave Christopher a guess as
to whose it was, that was speedily made certainty by a call that jarred
all the sleepy enchantment of the glade.
“Fran-cie!”
Christopher shrank lower behind a mossy stone, and wildly hoped that his
unconcealable white flannels might be mistaken for the stem of a fallen
birch.
“Fran-cie!”
It had come nearer, and Christopher anticipated the inevitable discovery
by getting up and speaking.
“I’m afraid she’s not here, Miss Mullen. She has not been here for half
an hour at least.” He did not feel bound to add that when he first sat
down by the pool, he had heard Miss Fitzpatrick’s and Mr. Hawkins’
voices in high and agreeable altercation on the opposite side of the
island to that taken by the rest of the party.
The asperity that had been discernible in Miss Mullen’s summons to her
cousin vanished at once.
“My goodness me! Mr. Dysart! To think of your being here all the time,
‘Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife!’ Here I am hunting for
that naughty girl to tell her to come and help to make tea, instead of
letting your poor sister have all the trouble by herself.”
Charlotte was rather out of breath, and looked hot and annoyed, in spite
of the smile with which she lubricated her remark.
“Oh, my sister is used to that sort of thing,” said Christopher, “and
Miss Hope-Drummond is there to help, isn’t she?”
Charlotte had seated herself on a rock, and was fanning herself with her
pocket-handkerchief; evidently going to make herself agreeable,
Christopher thought, with an irritability that lost no detail of her
hand’s ungainly action.
“I don’t think Miss Hope-Drummond is much in the utilitarian line,” she
said, with a laugh that was as slighting as she dared to make it. “Hers
is the purely ornamental, I should imagine. Now, I will say for poor
Francie, if she was there, no one would work harder than she would, and,
though I say it that shouldn’t, I think she’s ornamental too.”
“Oh, highly ornamental,” said Christopher politely. “I don’t think there
can be any doubt about that.”
“You’re very good to say so,” replied Charlotte effusively; “but I can
tell you, Mr. Dysart, that poor child has had to make herself useful as
well as ornamental before now. From what she tells me I suspect there
were few things she didn’t have to put her hand to before she came down
to me here.”
“Really!” said Christopher, as politely as before, “that was very hard
luck.”
“You may say that it was!” returned Charlotte, planting a hand on each
knee with elbows squared outwards, as was her wont in moments of
excitement, and taking up her parable against the Fitzpatricks with all
the enthusiasm of a near relation. “Her uncle and aunt are very good
people in their way, I suppose, but beyond feeding her and putting
clothes on her back, I don’t know what they did for her.”
Charlotte had begun her sentence with comparative calm, but she had
gathered heat and velocity as she proceeded. She paused with a snort,
and Christopher, who had never before been privileged to behold her in
her intenser moments, said, without a very distinct idea of what was
expected of him:
“Oh, really, and who are these amiable people?”
“Fitzpatricks!” spluttered Miss Mullen, “and no better than the dirt
under my poor cousin Isabella Mullen’s feet. It’s through _her_
Francie’s related to me, and not through the Fitzpatricks at all. _I’m_
no relation of the Fitzpatricks, thank God! My father’s brother married
a Butler, and Francie’s grandmother was a Butler too--”
“It’s very intricate,” murmured Christopher; “it sounds as if she ought
to have been a parlour-maid.”
“And that’s the only connection I am of the Fitzpatricks,” continued
Miss Mullen at lightning speed, oblivious of interruption; “but Francie
takes after her mother’s family and her grandmother’s family, and your
poor father would tell you if he was able, that the Butlers of Tally Ho
were as well known in their time as the Dysarts of Bruff!”
“I’m sure he would,” said Christopher feebly, thinking as he spoke that
his conversations with his father had been wont to treat of more
stirring and personal topics than the bygone glories of the Butlers.
“Yes, indeed, as good a family as any in the county. People laugh at me,
and say I’m mad about family and pedigree; but I declare to goodness,
Mr. Dysart, I think the French are right when they say, ‘_bong song ne
poo mongtir_,’ and there’s nothing like good blood after all.”
Charlotte possessed the happy quality of believing in the purity of her
own French accent, and she felt a great satisfaction in rounding her
peroration with a quotation in that tongue. She had, moreover, worked
off some of the irritation which had, from various causes, been seething
within her when she met Christopher; and when she resumed her discourse
it was in the voice of the orator, who, having ranted out one branch of
his subject, enters upon the next with almost awful quietness.
“I don’t know why I should bore you about a purely family matter, Mr.
Dysart, but the truth is, it cuts me to the heart when I see your
sister--your charming sister--yes, and Miss Hope-Drummond too--not that
I’d mention her in the same breath with Miss Dysart--with every
advantage that education can give them, and then to think of that poor
girl, brought up from hand to mouth, and her little fortune that should
have been spent on herself going, as I may say, to fill the stomachs of
the Fitzpatricks’ brood!”
Christopher raised himself from the position of leaning against a tree,
in which he had listened, not without interest, to the recital of
Francie’s wrongs.
“I don’t think you need apologise for Miss Fitzpatrick,” he said, rather
more coldly than he had yet spoken. He had ceased to be amused by Miss
Mullen; eccentricity was one thing, but vulgar want of reserve was
another; he wondered if she discussed her cousin’s affairs thus openly
with all her friends.
“It’s very kind of you to say so,” rejoined Miss Mullen eagerly, “but I
know very well you’re not blind, any more than I am, and all my
affection for the girl can’t make me shut my eyes to what’s unlady-like
or bad style, though I know it’s not her fault.”
Christopher looked at his watch surreptitiously.
“Now I’m delaying you in a most unwarrantable way,” said Charlotte,
noting and interpreting the action at once, “but I got so hot and tired
running about the woods that I had to take a rest. I was trying to get a
chance to say a word to your sister about Francie to ask her to be kind
to her, but I daresay it’ll come to the same thing now that I’ve had a
chat with you,” she concluded, rising from her seat and smiling with
luscious affability.
A little below the pond two great rocks leaned towards each other, and
between them a hawthorn bush had pressed itself up to the light.
Something like a path was trodden round the rocks, and a few rags
impaled on the spikes of the thorn bush denoted that it marked the place
of a holy well. Conspicuous among these votive offerings were two white
rags, new and spotless, and altogether out of keeping with the scraps of
red flannel and dirty frieze that had been left by the faithful in lieu
of visiting cards for the patron saint of the shrine. Christopher and
Charlotte’s way led them within a few yards of the spot; the latter’s
curiosity induced her, as she passed, to examine the last contributions
to the thorn bush.
“I wonder who has been tearing up their best pocket-handkerchiefs for a
wish?” said Christopher, putting up his eye-glass and peering at the
rags.
“Two bigger fools than the rest of them, I suppose,” said Miss Mullen
shortly; “we’d better hurry on now, Mr. Dysart, or we’ll get no tea.”
She swept Christopher in front of her along the narrow path before he
had time to see that the last two pilgrims had determined that the
saint should make no mistake about their identity, and had struck upon
the thorn bush the corners of their handkerchiefs, one of them, a silken
triangle, having on it the initials G. H., while on the other was a
large and evidently home-embroidered F.