Sir Benjamin Dysart’s funeral was an event of the past. It was a full
three weeks since the family vault in Lismoyle Churchyard had closed its
door upon that ornament of county society; Lady Dysart’s friends were
beginning to recover from the strain of writing letters of condolence to
her on her bereavement, and Christopher, after sacrificing to his
departed parent’s memory a week of perfect sailing weather, had had his
boat painted, and had relapsed into his normal habit of spending as much
of his time as was convenient on the lake.
There was still the mingled collapse and stir in the air that comes
between the end of an old regime and the beginning of a new. Christopher
had resigned his appointment at Copenhagen, feeling that his life would,
for the future, be vaguely filled with new duties and occupations, but
he had not yet discovered anything very novel to do beyond signing his
name a good many times, and trying to become accustomed to hearing
himself called Sir Christopher; occupations that seemed rather
elementary in the construction of a career. His want of initiative
energy in every-day matters kept him motionless and apathetic, waiting
for his new atmosphere to make itself palpable to him, and prepared to
resign himself to its conditions. He even, in his unquenchable
self-consciousness, knew that it would be wholesome for him if these
were such as he least liked; but in the meantime, he remained passively
unsettled, and a letter from Lord Castlemore, in which his tact and
conscientiousness as a secretary were fully set forth, roused no outside
ambition in him. He re-read it on a shimmering May morning, with one arm
hanging over the tiller of his boat, as she crept with scarcely
breathing sails through the pale streaks of calm that lay like dreams
upon the lake. He was close under the woods of Bruff, close enough to
feel how still and busy they were in the industry of spring. It seemed
to him that the sound of the insects was like the humming of her loom,
and almost mechanically he turned over the envelope of Lord Castlemore’s
letter, and began in the old familiar way to scrawl a line or two on the
back of it.
The well-known crest, however, disconcerted his fancy, and he fell again
to ruminating upon the letter itself. If this expressed the sum of his
abilities, diplomatic life was certainly not worth living. Tact and
conscientiousness were qualities that would grace the discharge of a
doctor’s butler, and might be expected from anyone of the most ordinary
intelligence. He could not think that his services to his country, as
concentrated in Lord Castlemore, were at all remarkable; they had given
him far less trouble than the most worthless of those efforts in prose
and verse, that, as he thought contemptuously, were like the skeletons
that mark the desert course of a caravan; he did not feel the
difficulty, and he, therefore, thought the achievement small. A toying
breeze fluttered the letter in his hand, and the boat tilted languidly
in recognition of it. The water began to murmur about the keel, and
Christopher presently found himself gliding smoothly towards the middle
of the lake.
He looked across at Lismoyle, spreading placidly along the margin of
the water, and as he felt the heat of the sun and the half-forgotten
largeness of summer in the air, he could have believed himself back in
the August of last year, and he turned his eyes to the trees of
Rosemount as if the sight of them would bring disillusionment. It was
some time now since he had first been made ashamed of the discovery that
disillusionment also meant relief. For some months he had clung to his
dream; at first helplessly, with a sore heart, afterwards with a more
conscious taking hold, as of something gained, that made life darker,
but for ever richer. It had been torture of the most simple, unbearable
kind, to drive away from Tally Ho, with the knowledge that Hawkins was
preferred to him; but sentiment had deftly usurped the place of his
blind suffering, and that stage came that is almost inevitable with
poetic natures, when the artistic sense can analyse sorrow, and sees the
beauty of defeat. Then he had heard that Francie was going to marry
Lambert, and the news had done more in one moment to disillusion him
than common sense could do in years. The thought stung him with a kind
of horror for her that she could tolerate such a fate as marrying Roddy
Lambert. He knew nothing of the tyrannies of circumstance. To prosperous
young men like Christopher, poverty, except barefooted and in rags, is a
name, and unpaid bills a joke. That Albatross Villa could have driven
her to the tremendous surrender of marriage was a thing incredible. All
that was left for him to believe was that he had been mistaken, and that
the lucent quality that he thought he had found in her soul had existed
only in his imagination. Now when he thought of her face it was with a
curious half regret that so beautiful a thing should no longer have any
power to move him. Some sense of loss remained, but it was charged with
self pity for the loss of an ideal. Another man in Christopher’s
position would not probably have troubled himself about ideals, but
Christopher, fortunately, or unfortunately for him, was not like other
men.
The fact must even be faced that he had probably never been in love with
her, according to the common acceptation of the term. His intellect
exhausted his emotions and killed them with solicitude, as a child digs
up a flower to see if it is growing, and his emotions themselves had a
feminine refinement, but lacked the feminine quality of unreasoning
pertinacity. From self-pity for the loss of an ideal to gratitude for an
escape is not far to go, and all that now remained to him of bitterness
was a gentle self-contempt for his own inadequacy in falling in love, as
in everything else.
It may be imagined that in Lismoyle Francie was a valued and almost
invariable topic of conversation. Each visitor to Rosemount went there
in the character of a scout, and a detailed account of her interview was
published on every possible occasion.
“Well, I took my time about calling on her,” observed Mrs. Baker; “I
thought I’d let her see I was in no hurry.”
Mrs. Corkran, with whom Mrs. Baker was having tea, felt guiltily
conscious of having called on Mrs. Lambert two days after her arrival,
and hastened to remind the company of the pastoral nature of the
attention.
“Oh, of course we know clergymen’s families can’t pick their company,”
went on Mrs. Baker, dismissing the interruption not without a secret
satisfaction that Carrie Beattie, who, in the absence of Miss Corkran,
was pouring out tea for her future mother-in-law, should see that other
people did not consider the Rev. Joseph such a catch as she did. “Only
that Lambert’s such a friend of Mr. Baker’s, and always banked with him,
I declare I don’t know that I’d have gone at all. I assure you it gave
me quite a turn to see her stuck up there in poor Lucy Lambert’s chair,
talking about the grand hotels that she was in, in London and Paris, as
if she never swept out a room or cleaned a saucepan in her life.”
“She had all the walls done round with those penny fans,” struck in Miss
Kathleen Baker, “and a box of French bongbongs out on the table; and oh,
mamma! did you notice the big photograph of him and her together on the
chimney-piece?”
“I could notice nothing, Kathleen, and I didn’t want to notice them,”
replied Mrs. Baker; “I could think of nothing but of what poor Lucy
Lambert would say to see her husband dancing attendance on that young
hussy without so much as a mourning ring on him, and her best
tea-service thrashed about as if it was kitchen delf.”
“Was he very devoted, Mrs. Baker?” asked Miss Beattie with a simper.
“Oh, I suppose he was,” answered Mrs. Baker, as if in contempt for any
sentiment inspired by Francie, “but I can’t say I observed anything very
particular.”
“Oh, then, _I_ did!” said Miss Baker with a nod of superior
intelligence; “I was watching them all the time; every word she uttered
he was listening to it, and when she asked for the tea-cosy he _flew_
for it!”
“Eliza Hackett told my Maria there was shocking waste going on in the
house now; fires in the drawing-room from eight o’clock in the morning,
and this the month of May!” said Mrs. Corkran with an approving eye at
the cascade of cut paper that decked her own grate, “and the cold meat
given to the boy that cleans the boots!”
“Roddy Lambert’ll be sorry for it some day when it’s too late,” said
Mrs. Baker darkly, “but men are all alike; it’s out of sight out of mind
with them!”
“Oh, Mrs. Baker,” wheezed Mrs. Corkran with asthmatic fervour, “I think
you’re altogether too cynical; I’m sure that’s not your opinion of Mr.
Baker.”
“I don’t know what he might do if I was dead,” replied Mrs. Baker, “but
I’ll answer for it he’ll not be carrying on with Number Two while _I’m_
alive, like other people I know!”
“Oh, don’t say such things before these young ladies,” said Mrs.
Corkran; “I wish them no greater blessing of Providence than a good
husband, and I think I may say that dear Carrie will find one in my
Joseph.”
The almost death-bed solemnity of this address paralysed the
conversation for a moment, and Miss Beattie concealed her blushes by
going to the window to see whose was the vehicle that had just driven
by.
“Oh, it’s Mr. Hawkins!” she exclaimed, feeling the importance of the
information.
Kathleen Baker sprang from her seat and ran to the window. “So it is!”
she cried, “and I bet you sixpence he’s going to Rosemount! My goodness,
I wish it was to-day we had gone there!”