Dinner was over. Gorman was regaling his fellows in the servants’ hall
with an account of how Miss Fitzpatrick had eaten her curry with a knife
and fork, and her Scotch woodcock with a spoon, and how she had accepted
every variety of wine that he had offered her, and taken only a mouthful
of each, an eccentricity of which William was even now reaping the
benefit in the pantry. Mrs. Brady, the cook, dared say that by all
accounts it was the first time the poor child had seen a bit served the
way it would be fit to put into a Christian’s mouth, and, indeed, it was
little she’d learn of behaviour or dinners from Miss Mullen, except to
make up messes for them dirty cats--a remark which obtained great
acceptance from her audience. Mr. Gorman then gave it as his opinion
that Miss Fitzpatrick was as fine a girl as you’d meet between this and
Dublin, and if he was Mr. Christopher, he’d prefer her to Miss
Hope-Drummond, even though the latter might be hung down with diamonds.
The object of this criticism was meantime congratulating herself that
she had accomplished the last and most dreaded of the day’s ceremonies,
and, so far as she knew, had gone through it without disaster. She
certainly felt as if she never had eaten so much in her life, and she
thought to herself that, taking into consideration the mental anxiety
and the loss of time involved in the consumption of one of these grand
dinners, she infinitely preferred the tea and poached eggs which formed
her ordinary repast. Pamela was at the piano, looking a long way off in
the dim pink light of the shaded room, and was playing such strange
music as Francie had never heard before, and secretly hoped never to
hear again. She had always believed herself to be extremely fond of
music, and was wont to feel very sentimental when she and one of that
tribe whom it is to be feared she spoke of as her “fellows,” sat on the
rocks at the back of Kingstown pier and listened to the band playing
“Dorothy,” or “The Lost Chord,” in the dark of the summer evening; but
these minor murmurings, that seemed to pass by steep and painful
chromatic paths from one woe to another, were to her merely exercises of
varying difficulty and ugliness, in which Miss Dysart never seemed to
get the chords quite right. She was too shy to get up and search for
amusement among the books and papers upon a remote table, and
accordingly she lay back in her chair and regarded Lady Dysart and Miss
Hope-Drummond, both comfortably absorbed in conversation, and wondered
whether she should ever have money enough to buy herself a tea-gown.
The door opened, and Christopher sauntered in; he looked round the room
through his eye-glass, and then wandered towards the piano, where he sat
down beside Pamela. Francie viewed this proceeding with less resentment
than if he had been any other man in the world; she did not so much mind
a neglect in which Miss Hope-Drummond was equally involved, and she was
rather frightened than otherwise, when soon afterwards she saw him, in
evident obedience to a hint from his sister, get up and come towards her
with a large photograph-book under his arm. He sat down beside her, and,
with what Pamela, watching from the distant piano, felt to be touching
docility, began to expound its contents to her. He had done this thing
so often before, and he knew, or thought he knew so well what people
were going to say, that nothing but the unfailing proprietary interest
in his own handiwork supported him on these occasions. He had not,
however, turned many pages before he found that Francie’s comments were
by no means of the ordinary tepid and perfunctory sort. The Oxford
chapels were, it is true, surveyed by her in anxious silence; but a
crowd of undergraduates leaning over a bridge to look at an eight--an
instantaneous photograph of a bump-race, with its running accompaniment
of maniacs on the bank--Christopher’s room, with Dinah sitting in his
armchair with a pipe in her mouth--were all examined and discussed with
fervid interest, and a cry of unfeigned excitement greeted the page on
which his own photography made its _début_ with a deep-brown portrait of
Pamela.
“Mercy on us! That’s not Miss Dysart! What has she her face blackened
for?”
“Oh, I did that when I didn’t know much about it last winter, and it’s
rather over-exposed,” answered Christopher, regarding his work of art
with a lenient parental eye.
“The poor thing! And was it the cold turned her black that way?”
Christopher glanced at his companion’s face to see whether this
ignorance was genuine, but before he had time to offer the scientific
explanation, she had pounced on a group below.
“Why, isn’t that the butler? Goodness! he’s the dead image of the Roman
Emperors in Mangnall’s questions! And who are all the other people? I
declare, one of them’s that queer man I saw in the hall with the old
gentleman--” She stopped and stammered as she realised that she had
touched on what must necessarily be a difficult subject.
“Yes, this is a photograph of the servants,” said Christopher, filling
the pause with compassionate speed, “and that’s James Canavan. You’ll
see him to-morrow night taking a leading part in Garry’s theatricals.”
“Why, d’ye tell me that man can act?”
“Act? I should think so!” he laughed, as if at some recollection or
other. “He can do anything he tries, or thinks he can. He began by being
a sort of hedge-schoolmaster, but he was too mad to stick to it. Anyhow,
my father took him up, and put him into the agency office, and now he’s
his valet, and teaches Garry arithmetic when he’s at home, and writes
poems and plays. I envy you your first sight of James Canavan on the
boards,” he ended, laughing again.
“The boards!” Francie thought to herself, “I wonder is it like a
circus?”
The photographs progressed serenely after this. Francie began to learn
something of the discreetness that must be observed in inspecting
amateur portrait photography, and Christopher, on his side, found he was
being better entertained by Miss Mullen’s cousin than he could have
believed possible. They turned page after page steadily and
conversationally, until Christopher made a pause of unconscious pride
and affection at a group of photographs of yachts in different
positions.
“These are some of the best I have,” he said; “that’s my boat, and that
is Mr. Lambert’s.”
“Oh, the nasty thing! I’m sure I don’t want to see _her_ again! and I
shouldn’t think you did either!” with an uncertain glance at him. It had
seemed to her when, once or twice before, she had spoken of the accident
to him, that it was a subject he did not care about. “Mr. Lambert says
that the upsetting wasn’t her fault a bit, and he likes going out in her
just the same. I think he’s a very brave man, don’t you?”
“Oh, very,” replied Christopher perfunctorily; “but he rather overdoes
it, I think, sometimes, and you know you got the worst of that
business.”
“I think _you_ must have had the worst of it,” she said timidly. “I
never was able to half thank you--” Even the equalising glow from the
pink lampshades could not conceal the deepening of the colour in her
cheeks.
“Oh, please don’t try,” interrupted Christopher, surprised into a
fellow-feeling of shyness, and hastily turning over the yachting page;
“it was nothing at all.”
“Indeed, I wanted to say it to you before,” persevered Francie, “that
time at the bazaar, but there always were people there. Charlotte told
me that only for you the pike would be eating me at the bottom of the
lake!” she ended with a nervous laugh.
“What a very unpleasant thing to say, and not strictly true,” said
Christopher lightly. “Do you recognise Miss Mullen in this?” he went on,
hurrying from the subject.
“Oh, how pretty!” cried Francie, peering into a small and dark picture;
“but I don’t see Charlotte. It’s the waterfall in the grounds, isn’t
it?”
Pamela looked over from the piano again, amazed to hear her brother’s
voice raised in loud laughter. There was no denying that the picture was
like a waterfall, and Francie at first rejected with scorn the
explanation that it represented a Sunday-school feast.
“Ah, go on, Mr. Dysart! Why, I see the white water and the black rocks,
and all!”
“That’s the table-cloth, and the black rocks are the children’s faces,
and that’s Miss Mullen.”
“Well, I’m very glad you never took any Sunday-school feast ever _I_ was
at, if that’s what you make them look like.”
“You don’t mean to say you go to Sunday-school feasts?”
“Yes, why wouldn’t I? I never missed one till this year; they’re the
grandest fun out!”
Christopher stared at her. He was not prepared for a religious aspect in
Miss Mullen’s remarkable young cousin.
“Do you teach in Sunday-schools?” He tried to keep the incredulity out
of his voice, but Francie caught the tone.
“You’re very polite! I suppose you think I know nothing at all, but I
can tell you I could say down all the judges of Israel, or the
journeyings of St. Paul this minute, and that’s more than you could do!”
“By Jove, it is!” answered Christopher, with another laugh. “And is that
what you talk about at school feasts?”
Francie laid her head back on the cushion of her chair, and looked at
him from under her lowered eyelashes. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” she
said. She suddenly found that this evening she was not in the least
afraid of Mr. Dysart. There were some, notably Roddy Lambert, who called
him a prig, but she said to herself that she’d tell him as soon as she
saw him that Mr. Dysart was a very nice young man, and not a bit
stuck-up.
“Very much,” Christopher replied, sticking his eye-glass into his eye,
“that was why I asked.” He really felt curious to know more of this
unwonted young creature, with her ingenuous impudence and her lovely
face. If anyone else had said the things that she had said, he would
have been either bored or revolted, and it is possibly worth noting
that, concurrently with a nascent interest in Francie, he was
consciously surprised that he was neither bored nor revolted. Perhaps it
was the influence of the half-civilised northern music that Pamela was
playing, with its blood-stirring freshness, like the whistling wind of
dawn, and its strange snatches of winding sweetness, that woke some
slumbering part of him to a sense of her charm and youth. But Pamela
guessed nothing of what Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” was doing for her brother,
and only thought how gallantly he was fulfilling her behest.
Before he said good-night to Francie, Christopher had learned a good
deal that he did not know before. He had heard how she and Mr. Whitty,
paraphrased as “a friend of mine,” had got left behind on Bray Head,
while the rest of the Sunday-school excursion was being bundled into the
train, and how she and the friend had missed three trains, from causes
not thoroughly explained, and how Mr. Lambert, who had gone there with
her, just for the fun of the thing, had come back to look for them, and
had found them having tea in the station refreshment room, and had been
mad. He had heard also of her stay at Kingstown, and of how a certain
Miss Carrie Jemmison--sister, as was explained, of another “friend”--was
wont to wake her up early to go out bathing, by the simple expedient of
pulling a string which hung out of the bedroom window over the hall
door, and led thence to Miss Fitzpatrick’s couch, where it was fastened
to her foot; in fact, by half-past ten o’clock, he had gathered a
surprisingly accurate idea of Miss Fitzpatrick’s manner of life, and had
secretly been a good deal taken aback by it.
He said to himself, as he smoked a final cigarette, that she must be a
nice girl somehow not to have been more vulgar than she was, and she
really must have a soul to be saved. There was something about her--some
limpid quality--that kept her transparent and fresh like a running
stream, and cool, too, he thought, with a grin and with a great deal of
reflective stroking of Dinah’s apathetic head, as she lay on his
uncomfortable lap trying to make the best of a bad business. He had not
failed to notice the recurrence of Mr. Lambert’s name in these recitals,
and was faintly surprised that he could not call to mind having heard
Miss Fitzpatrick mentioned by that gentleman until just before her
arrival in Lismoyle. Lambert was not usually reticent about the young
ladies of his acquaintance, and from Francie’s own showing he must have
known her very well indeed. He wondered how she came to be such a friend
of his; Lambert was a first-rate man of business and all that, but there
was nothing else first-rate about him that he could see. It showed the
social poverty of the land that she should speak of him with confidence
and even admiration; it was almost pathetic that she should know no
better than to think Roddy Lambert a fine fellow. His thoughts wandered
to the upset of the _Daphne_; what an ass Lambert had made of himself
then. If she could know how remarkably near her friend, Mr. Lambert, had
come to drowning her on that occasion, she would not, perhaps, have
quoted him so largely as a final opinion upon all matters. No one blamed
a man for not being able to swim, but the fact that he was a bad swimmer
was no excuse for his losing his head and coming cursing and swearing
and doing his best to drown everyone else.
Christopher let Dinah slip on to the floor, and threw the end of his
cigarette out of the open window of his room. He listened to the sleepy
quacking of a wild-duck, and the far-away barking of the gate-house dog.
The trees loomed darkly at the end of the garden; between them glimmered
the pale ghost of the lake, streaked here and there with the long
quivering reflections of the stars, and in and through the warm summer
night, the darting flight of the bats wove a phantom net before his
eyes. The Grieg music still throbbed an untiring measure in his head,
and the thought of Lambert gave way to more accustomed meditations. He
had leaned his elbows on the sill, and did not move till some time
afterwards, when a bat brushed his face with her wings in an attempt to
get into the lighted room. Then he got up and yawned a rather dreary
yawn.
“Well, the world’s a very pretty place,” he said to himself; “it’s a
pity it doesn’t seem to meet all the requirements of the situation.”
He was still young enough to forget at times the conventionality of
cynicism.