The house that the Fitzpatricks had taken in Bray for the winter was not
situated in what is known as the fashionable part of the town. It
commanded no view either of the Esplanade or of Bray Head; it had, in
fact, little view of any kind except the backs of other people’s houses,
and an oblique glimpse of a railway bridge at the end of the road. It
was just saved from the artisan level by a tiny bow window on either
side of the hall door, and the name, Albatross Villa, painted on the
gate posts; and its crowning claim to distinction was the fact that by
standing just outside the gate it was possible to descry, under the
railway bridge, a small square of esplanade and sea that was Mrs.
Fitzpatrick’s justification when she said gallantly to her Dublin
friends that she’d never have come to Bray for the winter only for
being able to look out at the waves all day long.
Poor Mrs. Fitzpatrick did not tell her friends that she had, nowadays,
things to occupy herself with that scarcely left her time for taking
full advantage of this privilege. From the hour of the awakening of her
brood to that midnight moment when, with fingers roughened and face
flushed from the darning of stockings, she toiled up to bed, she was
scarcely conscious that the sea existed, except when Dottie came in with
her boots worn into holes by the pebbles of the beach, or Georgie’s
Sunday trousers were found to be smeared with tar from riding astride
the upturned boats. There were no longer for her the afternoon naps that
were so pleasantly composing after four o’clock dinner; it was now her
part to clear away and wash the dishes and plates, so as to leave
Bridget, the “general,” free to affair herself with the clothes-lines in
the back garden, whereon the family linen streamed and ballooned in the
east wind that is the winter prerogative of Bray. She had grown
perceptibly thinner under this discipline, and her eyes had dark
swellings beneath them that seemed pathetically unbecoming to anyone
who, like Francie, had last seen her when the rubicund prosperity of
Mountjoy Square had not yet worn away. Probably an Englishwoman of her
class would have kept her household in comparative comfort with less
effort and more success, but Aunt Tish was very far from being an
Englishwoman; her eyes were not formed to perceive dirt, nor her nose to
apprehend smells, and her idea of domestic economy was to indulge in no
extras of soap or scrubbing brushes, and to feed her family on strong
tea and indifferent bread and butter, in order that Ida’s and Mabel’s
hats might be no whit less ornate than those of their neighbours.
Francie had plunged into the heart of this squalor with characteristic
recklessness; and the effusion of welcome with which she had been
received, and the comprehensive abuse lavished by Aunt Tish upon
Charlotte, were at first sufficient to make her forget the frouziness of
the dining-room, and the fact that she had to share a bedroom with her
cousins, the two Misses Fitzpatrick. Francie had kept the particulars of
her fight with Charlotte to herself. Perhaps she felt that it would not
be easy to make the position clear to Aunt Tish’s comprehension which
was of a rudimentary sort in such matters, and apt to jump to crude
conclusions. Perhaps she had become aware that even the ordinary
atmosphere of her three months at Lismoyle was as far beyond Aunt Tish’s
imagination as the air of Paradise, but she certainly was not inclined
to enlarge on her sentimental experiences to her aunt and cousins; all
that they knew was, that she had “moved in high society,” and that she
had fought with Charlotte Mullen on general and laudable grounds. It was
difficult at times to parry the direct questions of Ida, who, at
sixteen, had already, with the horrible precocity prevalent in her grade
of society, passed through several flirtations of an out-door and
illicit kind; but if Ida’s curiosity could not be parried it could be
easily misled, and the family belief in Francie’s power of breaking,
impartially, the hearts of all the young men whom she met, was a shield
to her when she was pressed too nearly about “young Mr. Dysart,” or “th’
officers.” Loud, of course, and facetious were the lamentations that
Francie had not returned “promised” to one or other of these heroes of
romance, but not even Ida’s cultured capacity could determine which had
been the more probable victim. The family said to each other in private
that Francie had “got very close”; even the boys were conscious of a
certain strangeness about her, and did not feel inclined to show her, as
of yore, the newest subtlety in catapults, or the latest holes in their
coats.
She herself was far more conscious of strangeness and remoteness;
though, when she had first arrived at Albatross Villa, the crowded,
carpetless house, and the hourly conflict of living were reviving and
almost amusing after the thunderous gloom of her exit from Tally Ho.
Almost the first thing she had done had been to write to Hawkins to tell
him of what had happened; a letter that her tears had dropped on, and
that her pen had flown in the writing of, telling how she had been
turned out because she had refused--or as good as refused--Mr. Dysart
for his--Gerald’s--sake, and how she hoped he hadn’t written to Tally
Ho, “for it’s little chance there’d be Charlotte would send on the
letter.” Francie had intended to break off at this point, and leave to
Gerald’s own conscience the application of the hint; but an unused half
sheet at the end of her letter tempted her on, and before she well knew
what she was saying, all the jealousy and hurt tenderness and helpless
craving of the past month were uttered without a thought of diplomacy or
pride. Then a long time had gone by, and there had been no answer from
Hawkins. The outflung emotion that had left her spent and humbled, came
back in bitterness to her, as the tide gives back in a salt flood the
fresh waters of a river, and her heart closed upon it, and bore the pain
as best it might.
It was not till the middle of October that Hawkins answered her letter.
She knew before she opened the envelope that she was going to be
disappointed; how could anyone explain away a silence of two months on
one sheet of small note-paper, one side of which, as she well knew, was
mainly occupied by the regimental crest, much less reply in the smallest
degree to that letter that had cost so much in the writing, and so much
more in the repenting of its length and abandonment? Mr. Hawkins had
wisely steered clear of both difficulties by saying no more than that he
had been awfully glad to hear from her, and he would have written before
if he could, but somehow he never could find a minute to do so. He would
have given a good deal to have seen that row with Miss Mullen, and as
far as Dysart was concerned, he thought Miss Mullen had the rights of
it; he was going away on first leave now, and wouldn’t be back at
Lismoyle till the end of the year, when he hoped he would find her and
old Charlotte as good friends as ever. He, Mr. Hawkins, was really not
worth fighting about; he was stonier broke than he had ever been, and,
in conclusion, he was hers (with an illegible hieroglyphic to express
the exact amount), Gerald Hawkins.
Like the last letter she had had from him, this had come early in the
morning, but on this occasion she could not go up to her room to read it
in peace. The apartment that she shared with Ida and Mabel offered few
facilities for repose, and none for seclusion, and, besides, there was
too much to be done in the way of helping to lay the table and get the
breakfast. She hurried about the kitchen in her shabby gown, putting the
kettle on to a hotter corner of the range, pouring treacle into a
jampot, and filling the sugar-basin from a paper bag with quick,
trembling fingers; her breath came pantingly, and the letter that she
had hidden inside the front of her dress crackled with the angry rise
and fall of her breast. That he should advise her to go and make friends
with Charlotte, and tell her she had made a mistake in refusing Mr.
Dysart, and never say a word about all that she had said to him in her
letter--!
“Francie’s got a letter from her sweetheart!” said Mabel, skipping round
the kitchen, and singing the words in a kind of chant. “Ask her for the
lovely crest for your album, Bobby!”
Evidently the ubiquitous Mabel had studied the contents of the
letter-box.
“Ah, it’s well to be her,” said Bridget, joining in the conversation
with her accustomed ease; “it’s long before _my_ fella would write me a
letter!”
“And it’s little you want letters from him,” remarked Bobby, in his
slow, hideous, Dublin brogue, “when you’re out in the lane talking to
another fella every night.”
“Ye lie!” said Bridget, with a flattered giggle, while Bobby ran up the
kitchen stairs after Francie, and took advantage of her having the
teapot in one hand and the milk-jug in the other to thrust his treacly
fingers into her pocket in search of the letter.
“Ah, have done!” said Francie angrily; “look, your after making me spill
the milk!”
But Bobby who had been joined by Mabel, continued his persecutions, till
his cousin, freeing herself of her burdens, turned upon him and boxed
his ears with a vigour that sent him howling upstairs to complain to his
mother.
After this incident, Francie’s life at Albatross Villa went on, as it
seemed to her, in a squalid monotony of hopelessness. The days became
darker and colder, and the food and firing more perceptibly
insufficient, and strong tea a more prominent feature of each meal, and
even Aunt Tish lifted her head from the round of unending, dingy cares,
and saw some change in Francie. She said to Uncle Robert, with an
excusable thought of Francie’s ungrudging help in the household, and her
contribution to it of five shillings a week, that it would be a pity if
the sea air didn’t suit the girl; and Uncle Robert, arranging a greasy
satin tie under his beard at the looking-glass, preparatory to catching
the 8.30 train for Dublin, had replied that it wasn’t his fault if it
didn’t, and if she chose to be fool enough to fight with Charlotte
Mullen she’d have to put up with it. Uncle Robert was a saturnine little
man of small abilities, whose reverses had not improved his temper, and
he felt that things were coming to a pretty pass if his wife was going
to make him responsible for the sea air, as well as the smoky kitchen
chimney, and the scullery sink that Bobby had choked with a dead jelly
fish, and everything else.
The only events that Francie felt to be at all noteworthy were her
letters from Mr. Lambert. He was not a brilliant letter writer, having
neither originality, nor the gift which is sometimes bestowed on
unoriginal people, of conveying news in a simple and satisfying manner;
but his awkward and sterile sentences were as cold waters to the thirsty
soul that was always straining back towards its time of abundance. She
could scarcely say the word Lismoyle now without a hesitation, it was so
shrined in dear and miserable remembrance, with all the fragrance of the
summer embalming it in her mind, that, unselfconscious as she was, the
word seemed sometimes too difficult to pronounce. Lambert himself had
become a personage of a greater world, and had acquired an importance
that he would have resented had he known how wholly impersonal it was.
In some ways she did not like him quite as much as in the Dublin days,
when he had had the advantage of being the nearest thing to a gentleman
that she had met with; perhaps her glimpses of his home life and the
fact of his friendship with Charlotte had been disillusioning, or
perhaps the comparison of him with other and newer figures upon her
horizon had not been to his advantage; certainly it was more by virtue
of his position in that other world that he was great.
It was strange that in these comparisons it was to Christopher that she
turned for a standard. For her there was no flaw in Hawkins; her angry
heart could name no fault in him except that he had wounded it; but she
illogically felt Christopher’s superiority without being aware of
deficiency in the other. She did not understand Christopher; she had
hardly understood him at that moment to which she now looked back with a
gratified vanity that was tempered by uncertainty and not unmingled
with awe; but she knew him just well enough, and had just enough
perception to respect him. Fanny Hemphill and Delia Whitty would have
regarded him with a terror that would have kept them dumb in his
presence, but for which they would have compensated themselves at other
times by explosive gigglings at his lack of all that they admired most
in young men. Some errant streak of finer sense made her feel his
difference from the men she knew, without wanting to laugh at it; as has
already been said, she respected him, an emotion not hitherto awakened
by a varied experience of “gentlemen friends.”
There were times when the domestic affairs of Albatross Villa touched
their highest possibility of discomfort, when Bridget had gone to the
christening of a friend’s child at Enniskerry, and returned next day
only partially recovered from the potations that had celebrated the
event; or when Dottie, unfailing purveyor of diseases to the family, had
imported German measles from her school. At these times Francie, as she
made fires, or beds, or hot drinks, would think of Bruff and its
servants with a regret that was none the less burning for its
ignobleness. Several times when she lay awake at night, staring at the
blank of her own future, while the stabs of misery were sharp and
unescapable, she had thought that she would write to Christopher, and
tell him what had happened, and where she was. In those hours when
nothing is impossible and nothing is unnatural, his face and his words,
when she saw him last, took on their fullest meaning, and she felt as if
she had only to put her hand out to open that which she had closed. The
diplomatic letter, about nothing in particular, that should make
Christopher understand that she would like to see him again, was often
half composed, had indeed often lulled her sore heart and hot eyes to
sleep with visions of the divers luxuries and glories that this single
stepping-stone should lead to. But in the morning, when the children had
gone to school, and she had come in from marketing, it was not such an
easy thing to sit down and write a letter about nothing in particular to
Mr. Dysart. Her defeat at the hands of Hawkins had taken away her belief
in herself. She could not even hint to Christopher the true version of
her fight with Charlotte, sure though she was that an untrue one had
already found its way to Bruff; she could not tell him that Bridget had
got drunk, and that butter was so dear they had to do without it; such
emergencies did not somehow come within the scope of her promise to
trust him, and, besides, there was the serious possibility of his
volunteering to see her. She would have given a good deal to see him,
but not at Albatross Villa. She pictured him to herself, seated in the
midst of the Fitzpatrick family, with Ida making eyes at him from under
her fringe, and Bridget scuffling audibly with Bobby outside the door.
Tally Ho was a palace compared with this, and yet she remembered what
she had felt when she came back to Tally Ho from Bruff. When she thought
of it all, she wondered whether she could bring herself to write to
Charlotte, and try to make friends with her again. It would be dreadful
to do, but her life at Albatross Villa was dreadful, and the dream of
another visit to Lismoyle, when she could revenge herself on Hawkins by
showing him his unimportance to her, was almost too strong for her
pride. How much of it was due to her thirst to see him again at any
price, and how much to a pitiful hankering after the flesh-pots of
Egypt, it is hard to say; but November and December dragged by, and she
did not write to Christopher or Charlotte, and Lambert remained her only
correspondent at Lismoyle.
It was a damp, dark December, with rain and wind nearly every day. Bray
Head was rarely without a cap of grey cloud, and a restless pack of
waves mouthing and leaping at its foot. The Esplanade was a mile-long
vista of soaked grass and glistening asphalte, whereon the foot of man
apparently never trod; once or twice a storm had charged in from the
south-east, and had hurled sheets of spray and big stones on to it, and
pounded holes in the concrete of its sea-wall. There had been such a
storm the week before Christmas. The breakers had rushed upon the long
beach with “a broad-flung, shipwrecking roar,” and the windows of the
houses along the Esplanade were dimmed with salt and sand. The rain had
come in under the hall door at Albatross Villa, the cowl was blown off
the kitchen chimney, causing the smoke to make its exit through the
house by various routes, and, worst of all, Dottie and the boys had not
been out of the house for two days. Christmas morning was signalised by
the heaviest downpour of the week. It was hopeless to think of going to
church, least of all for a person whose most presentable boots were
relics of the past summer, and bore the cuts of lake rocks on their
dulled patent leather. The post came late, after its wont, but it did
not bring the letter that Francie had not been able to help expecting.
There had been a few Christmas cards, and one letter which did indeed
bear the Lismoyle postmark, but was only a bill from the Misses Greely,
forwarded by Charlotte, for the hat that she had bought to replace the
one that was lost on the day of the capsize of the _Daphne_.
The Christmas mid-day feast of tough roast-beef and pallid plum-pudding
was eaten, and then, unexpectedly, the day brightened, a thin sunlight
began to fall on the wet roads and the dirty, tossing sea, and Francie
and her younger cousins went forth to take the air on the Esplanade.
They were the only human beings upon it when they first got there; in
any other weather Francie might have expected to meet a friend or two
from Dublin there, as had occurred on previous Sundays, when the still
enamoured Tommy Whitty had ridden down on his bicycle, or Fanny Hemphill
and her two medical student brothers had asked her to join them in a
walk round Bray Head. The society of the Hemphills and Mr. Whitty had
lost, for her, much of its pristine charm, but it was better than
nothing at all; in fact, those who saw the glances that Miss
Fitzpatrick, from mere force of habit, levelled at Mr. Whitty, or were
witnesses of a pebble-throwing encounter with the Messrs. Hemphill,
would not have guessed that she desired anything better than these
amusements.
“Such a Christmas Day!” she thought to herself, “without a soul to see
or to talk to! I declare, I think I’ll turn nurse in a hospital, the way
Susie Brennan did. They say those nurses have grand fun, and ’twould be
better than this awful old place anyhow!” She had walked almost to the
squat Martello tower, and while she looked discontentedly up at Bray
Head, the last ray of sun struck on its dark shoulder as if to challenge
her with the magnificence of its outline and the untruthfulness of her
indictment. “Oh, you may shine away!” she exclaimed, turning her back
upon both sunlight and mountain and beginning to walk back to where
Bobby and Dottie were searching for jelly-fish among the sea-weed cast
up by the storm, “the day’s done for now, it’s as good for me to go up
to the four o’clock service as be streeling about in the cold here.”
Almost at the same moment the chimes from the church on the hill behind
the town struck out upon the wind with beautiful severity, and obeying
them listlessly, she left the children and turned up the steep suburban
road that was her shortest way to Christ Church.
It was a long and stiffish pull; the wind blew her hair about till it
looked like a mist of golden threads, the colour glowed dazzlingly in
her cheeks, and the few men whom she passed bestowed upon her a stare of
whose purport she was well aware. This was a class of compliment which
she neither resented nor was surprised at, and it is quite possible that
some months before she might have allowed her sense of it to be
expressed in her face. But she felt now as if the approval of the man in
the street was not worth what it used to be. It was, of course,
agreeable in its way, but on this Christmas afternoon, with all its
inevitable reminders of the past and the future, it brought with it the
thought of how soon her face had been forgotten by the men who had
praised it most.
The gas was lighted in the church, and the service was just beginning as
she passed the decorated font and went uncertainly up a side-aisle till
she was beckoned into a pew by a benevolent old lady. She knelt down in
a corner, beside a pillar that was wreathed with a thick serpent of
evergreens, and the old lady looked up from her admission of sin to
wonder that such a pretty girl was allowed to walk through the streets
by herself. The heat of the church had brought out the aromatic smell of
all the green things, the yellow gas flared from its glittering
standards, and the glimmering colours of the east window were dying into
darkness with the dying daylight. When she stood up for the psalms she
looked round the church to see if there were anyone there whom she knew;
there were several familiar faces, but no one with whom she had ever
exchanged a word, and turning round again she devoted herself to the
hopeless task of finding out the special psalms that the choir were
singing. Having failed in this, she felt her religious duties to be for
the time suspended, and her thoughts strayed afield over things in
general, settling down finally on a subject that had become more
pressing than was pleasant.
It is a truism of ancient standing that money brings no cure for
heartache, but it is also true that if the money were not there the
heartache would be harder to bear. Probably if Francie had returned from
Lismoyle to a smart house in Merrion Square, with a carriage to drive
in, and a rich relative ready to pay for new winter dresses, she would
have been less miserable over Mr. Hawkins’ desertion than she was at
Albatross Villa; she certainly would not have felt as unhappy as she did
now, standing up with the shrill singing clamouring in her ears, while
she tried in different ways to answer the question of how she was to pay
for the dresses that she had bought to take to Lismoyle. Twenty-five
pounds a year does not go far when more than half of it is expended upon
board and lodging, and a whole quarter has been anticipated to pay for a
summer visit, and Lambert’s prophecy that she would find herself in the
county court some day, seemed not unlikely to come true. In her pocket
was a letter from a Dublin shop, containing more than a hint of legal
proceedings; and even if she were able to pay them a temporising two
pounds in a month, there still would remain five pounds due, and she
would not have a farthing left to go on with. Everything was at its
darkest for her. Her hardy, supple nature was dispirited beyond its
power of reaction, and now and then the remembrance of the Sundays of
last summer caught her, till the pain came in her throat, and the
gaslight spread into shaking stars.
The service went on, and Francie rose and knelt mechanically with the
rest of the congregation. She was not irreligious, and even the name of
scepticism was scarcely understood by her, but she did not consider that
religion was applicable to love affairs and bills; her mind was too
young and shapeless for anything but a healthy, negligent belief in what
she had been taught, and it did not enter into her head to utilise
religion as a last resource, when everything else had turned out a
failure. She regarded it with respect, and believed that most people
grew good when they grew old, and the service passed over her head with
a vaguely pleasing effect of music and light. As she came out into the
dark lofty porch, a man stepped forward to meet her. Francie started
violently.
“Oh, goodness gracious!” she cried, “you frightened my life out!”
But for all that, she was glad to see Mr. Lambert.