Francie felt an unexpected weakness in her knees when she walked
downstairs next day. She found herself clutching the stair-rail with an
absurdly tight grasp, and putting her feet down with trembling caution
on the oil-cloth stair covering, and when she reached the drawing-room
she was thankful to subside into Charlotte’s arm-chair, and allow her
dizzy head to recover its equilibrium. She thought very little about her
nerves; in fact, was too ignorant to know whether she possessed such
things, and she gave a feeble laugh of surprise at the way her heart
jumped and fluttered when the door slammed unexpectedly behind her. The
old green sofa had been pulled out from the wall and placed near the
open window, with the Dublin _Express_ laid upon it; Francie noticed and
appreciated the attention, and noted, too, that an arm-chair, sacred to
the use of visitors had been planted in convenient relation to the sofa.
“For Mr. Dysart, I suppose,” she thought, with a curl of her pretty lip;
“he’ll be as much obliged to her as I am.” She pushed the chair away,
and debated with herself as to whether she should dislodge the two cats
who, with faces of frowning withdrawal from all things earthly, were
heaped in simulated slumber in the corner of the sofa. She chose the
arm-chair, and, taking up the paper, languidly read the list of places
where bands would play in the coming week, and the advertisement of the
anthem at St. Patrick’s for the next day.
How remote she felt from it all! How stale appeared these cherished
amusements! Most people would think the Lismoyle choir a poor substitute
for the ranks of white surplices in the chancel of St. Patrick’s, with
the banners of the knights hanging above them, but Francie thought it
much better fun to look down over the edge of the Lismoyle gallery at
the red coats of Captain Cursiter’s detachment, than to stand crushed in
the nave of the cathedral, even though the most popular treble was to
sing a solo, and though Mr. Thomas Whitty might be waiting on the steps
to disentangle her from the crowd that would slowly surge up them into
the street. A heavy booted foot came along the passage, and the door was
opened by Norry, holding in her grimy hand a tumbler containing a
nauseous-looking yellow mixture.
“Miss Charlotte bid me give ye a bate egg with a half glass of whisky in
it whenever ye’d come downstairs.” She stirred it with a black kitchen
fork, and proffered the sticky tumbler to Francie, who took it, and
swallowed the thin, flat liquid which it contained with a shudder of
loathing. “How bad y’are! Dhrink every dhrop of it now! An empty sack
won’t stand, and ye’re as white as a masheroon this minute. God knows
it’s in yer bed ye should be, and not shtuck out in a chair in the
middle of the flure readin’ the paper!” Her eye fell on the apparently
unconscious Mrs. and Miss Bruff. “Ha, ha! thin! how cosy the two of yez
is on yer sofa! Walk out, me Lady Ann!”
This courtesy-title, the expression of Norry’s supremest contempt and
triumph, was accompanied by a sudden onslaught with the hearth-brush,
but long before it could reach them, the ladies referred to had left the
room by the open window.
The room was very quiet after Norry had gone away. Francie took the
evicted holding of the cats, and fell speedily into a doze induced by
the unwonted half glass of whisky. Her early dinner, an unappetising
meal of boiled mutton and rice pudding, was but a short interlude in the
dulness of the morning; and after it was eaten, a burning tract of
afternoon extended itself between her and Mr. Dysart’s promised visit.
She looked out of the window at the sailing shreds of white cloud high
up in the deep blue of the sky, at the fat bees swinging and droning in
the purple blossoms of the columbine border, at two kittens playing
furiously in the depths of the mignonette bed; and regardless of
Charlotte’s injunctions about the heat of the sun, she said to herself
that she would go out into the garden for a little. It was three
o’clock, and her room was as hot as an oven when she went up to get her
hat; her head ached as she stood before the glass and arranged the wide
brim to her satisfaction, and stuck her best paste pin into the sailor’s
knot of her tie. Suddenly the door burst unceremoniously open, and
Norry’s grey head and filthy face were thrust round the edge of it.
“Come down, Miss Francie!” she said in a fierce whisper; “give over
making shnouts at yerself in the glass and hurry on down! Louisa isn’t
in, and sure I can’t open the doore the figure I am.”
“Who’s there?” asked Francie, with flushing cheeks.
“How would I know? I’d say ’twas Misther Lambert’s knock whatever. Sich
galloppin’ in and out of the house as there is these two days! Ye may
let in this one yerself!”
When Francie opened the hall-door she was both relieved and disappointed
to find that Norry had been right in the matter of the knock. Mr.
Lambert was apparently more taken by surprise than she was. He did not
speak at once, but, taking her hand, pressed it very hard, and when
Francie, finding the silence slightly embarrassing, looked up at him
with a laugh that was intended to simplify the situation, she was both
amazed and frightened to see a moisture suspiciously like tears in his
eyes.
“You--you look rather washed out,” he stammered.
“You’re very polite! Is that all you have to say to me?” she said,
slipping her hand out of his, and gaily ignoring his tragic tone. “You
and your old yacht nearly washed me out altogether! At all events, you
washed the colour out of me pretty well.” She put up her hands and
rubbed her cheeks. “Are you coming in or going out? Charlotte’s lunching
at the Bakers’, and I’m going into the garden till tea-time, so now you
can do as you like.”
“I’ll come into the garden with you,” he said, stepping aside to let her
pass out. “But are you sure your head is well enough for you to go out
in this sun?”
“Sun your granny!” responded Francie, walking gingerly across the gravel
in her high-heeled house shoes; “I’m as well as ever I was.”
“Well, you don’t look it,” he said with a concerned glance at the faint
colour in her cheeks and the violet shadows under her eyes. “Come and
sit down in the shade; it’s about all you’re good for.”
A path skirted the flower-beds and bent round the evergreen-covered
slope that rose between the house and the road, and at the bend a
lime-tree spread its flat, green boughs lavishly over the path, shading
a seat made of half-rotten larch poles that extended its dilapidated
arms to the passer-by.
“Well now, tell me all about it,” began Lambert as soon as they had sat
down. “What did you feel like when you began to remember it all? Were
you very angry with me?”
“Yes, of course, I was angry with you, and I am now this minute, and
haven’t I a good right, with my new hat at the bottom of the lake?”
“I can tell you we were both pretty nearly at the bottom of the lake
along with it,” said Lambert, who disapproved of this frivolous way of
treating the affair. “I don’t suppose I ever was nearer death than I
was when the sail was on top of me.”
Francie looked at him for one instant with awe-struck eyes, and Lambert
was congratulating himself on having made her realise the seriousness of
the situation, when she suddenly burst out laughing.
“Oh!” she apologised, “the thought just came into my head of the look of
Mrs. Lambert in a widow’s cap, and how she’d adore to wear one! You know
she would, now don’t you?”
“And I suppose you’d adore to see her in one?”
“Of course I would!” She gave him a look that was equivalent to the wag
of the tail with which a dog assures the obtuse human being that its
worrying and growling are only play. “You might know that without being
told. And now perhaps you’ll tell me how poor Mrs. Lambert is? I hear
she was greatly upset by the fright she got about you, and indeed you’re
not worthy of it.”
“She’s much better, thank you.”
He looked at Francie under his lowered lids, and tried to find it in his
heart to wish that she could sometimes be a little more grown up and
serious. She was leaning back with her hat crushed against a trunk of
the tree, so that its brim made a halo round her face, and the golden
green light that filtered through the leaves of the lime moved like
water over her white dress. If he had ever heard the story of “Undine”
it might have afforded him the comforting hypothesis that this delicate,
cool, youthful creature, with her provoking charm, could not possibly be
weighted with the responsibility of a soul; but an unfortunate lack of
early culture denied to Mr. Lambert this excuse for the levity with
which she always treated him--a man fifteen years older than she was,
her oldest friend, as he might say, who had always been kind to her ever
since she was a scut of a child. Her eyes were closed; but an occasional
quiver of the long lashes told him that she had no intention of
sleeping; she was only pretending to be tired, “out of tricks,” he
thought angrily. He waited for a moment or two, and then he spoke her
name. The corners of her mouth curved a little, but the eyelashes were
not raised.
“Are you tired, or are you shamming?”
“Shamming,” was the answer, still with closed eyes.
“Don’t you think you could open your eyes?”
“No.”
Another short period of silence ensued, and the sound of summer in the
air round them strengthened and deepened, as the colour strengthens and
deepens in a blush. A wasp strayed in under the canopy of the lime and
idled inquisitively about Francie’s hat and the bunch of mignonette in
her belt, but she lay so still under this supreme test that Lambert
thought she must be really asleep, and taking out his handkerchief
prepared to route the invader. At the same moment there came a sound of
wheels and a fast-trotting horse on the road; it neared them rapidly,
and Miss Fitzpatrick leaped to her feet and put aside the leaves of the
lime just in time to see the back of Mr. Hawkins’ head as his polo-cart
spun past the Tally Ho gate.
“I declare I thought it was Mr. Dysart,” she said, looking a little
ashamed of herself; “I wonder where in the name of fortune is Mr.
Hawkins going?”
“I thought you were so dead asleep you couldn’t hear anything,” said
Lambert, with a black look; “he’s not coming here, anyhow.”
She dropped back into the corner of the seat again as if the start
forward had tired her.
“Oh! I was so frightened at the wasp, and I wouldn’t let on!”
“I wonder why you’re always so unfriendly with me now,” began Lambert
suddenly, fixing his eyes upon her; “there was once on a time when we
were great friends, and you used to write to me, and you’d say you were
glad to see me when I went up to town, but now you’re so set up with
your Dysarts and your officers that you don’t think your old friends
worth talking to.”
“Oh!” Francie sat up and faced her accuser valiantly, but with an
inwardly-stricken conscience. “You know that’s a dirty, black lie!”
“I came over here this afternoon,” pursued Lambert, “very anxious about
you, and wanting to tell you how sorry I was, and how I accused myself
for what had happened--and how am I treated? You won’t so much as take
the trouble to speak to me. I suppose if I was one of your swell new
friends--Christopher Dysart, for instance, who you are looking out for
so hard--it would be a very different story.”
By the time this indictment was delivered, Francie’s face had more
colour in it than it had known for some days; she kept her eyes on the
ground and said nothing.
“I knew it was the way of the world to kick a fellow out of the way when
you had got as much as you wanted out of him, and I suppose as I am an
old married man I have no right to expect anything better, but I did
think you’d have treated _me_ better than this!”
“Don’t,” she said brokenly, looking up at him with her eyes full of
tears; “I’m too tired to fight you.”
Lambert took her hand quickly. “My child,” he said, in a voice rough
with contrition and pity, “I didn’t mean to hurt you; I didn’t know what
I was saying.” He tenderly stroked the hand that lay limply in his.
“Tell me you’re not vexed with me.”
“No,” said Francie, with a childish sob; “but you said horrid things to
me--”
“Well, I never will again,” he said soothingly. “We’ll always be
friends, won’t we?” with an interrogatory pressure of the hand. He had
never seen her in such a mood as this; he forgot the inevitable effect
on her nerves of what she had gone through, and his egotism made him
believe that this collapse of her usual supple hardihood was due to the
power of his reproaches.
“Yes,” she answered, with the dawn of a smile.
“Till the next time, anyhow,” continued Lambert, still holding her hand
in one of his, and fumbling in his breast pocket with the other. “And
now, look here what I brought you to try and make up to you for nearly
drowning you.” He gently pulled her hand down from her eyes, and held up
a small gold bangle, with a horse-shoe in pearls on it. “Isn’t that a
pretty thing?”
Francie looked at it incredulously, with the tears still shining on her
eyelashes.
“Oh, Mr. Lambert, you don’t mean you got that for me? I _couldn’t_ take
it. Why, it’s real gold!”
“Well, you’ve got to take it. Look what’s written on it.”
She took it from him, and saw engraved inside the narrow band of gold
her own name and the date of the accident.
“Now, you see it’s yours already,” he said. “No, you mustn’t refuse it,”
as she tried to put it back into his hand again. “There,” snapping it
quickly on to her wrist, “you must keep it as a sign you’re not angry
with me.”
“It’s like a policeman putting on a handcuff,” said Francie, with a
quivering laugh. “I’ve often seen them putting them on the drunken men
at Dublin.”
“And you’ll promise not to chuck over your old friends?” said Lambert
urgently.
“No, I won’t chuck them over,” she replied, looking confidingly at him.
“Not for anybody?” He weighted the question with all the expression he
was capable of.
“No, not for anybody,” she repeated, rather more readily than he could
have wished.
“And you’re sure you’re not angry with me?” he persisted, “and you like
the bangle?”
She had taken it off to re-examine it, and she held it up to him.
“Here, put it on me again, and don’t be silly,” she said, the old spirit
beginning to wake in her eyes.
“Do you remember when you were a child the way you used to thank me when
I gave you anything?” he asked, pressing her hand hard.
“But I’m not a child now!”
Lambert, looking in her face, saw the provoking smile spread like
sunshine from her eyes to her lips, and, intoxicated by it, he stooped
his head and kissed her.
Steps came running along the walk towards them, and the fat face and red
head of the Protestant orphan appeared under the boughs of the
lime-tree.
“A messenger from Bruff’s afther bringing this here, Miss Francie,” she
panted, tendering a letter in her fingers, “an’ Miss Charlotte lef’ me
word I should get tea when ye’d want it, an’ will I wet it now?”
Christopher had shirked the expression of Miss Fitzpatrick’s gratitude.