The Real Charlotte. Ross Martin

from possible pink to the full sunset flush that now burned in her cheeks and spanned the sharp ridge of her nose; and she still, as she had always done, bought her expensive Sunday bonnet as she would have bought a piece of furniture, because it was handsome, not because it was becoming. The garden hat which she now wore could not pretend to either of these qualifications, and, as Francie looked at her, the contrast between her and her husband was as conspicuous as even he could have wished.

      Francie’s first remark, however, after they had passed by, seemed to show that her point of view was not the same as his.

      “Won’t she be very lonely there all the afternoon by herself?” she asked, with a backward glance at the figure in the garden hat.

      “Oh, not she!” said Lambert carelessly, “she has the dog, and she’ll potter about there as happy as possible. She’s all right.” Then after a pause in which the drift of Francie’s question probably presented itself to him for the first time, “I wish everyone was as satisfied with their life as she is.”

      “How bad you are!” returned Francie, quite unmoved by the gloomy sentimental roll of Mr. Lambert’s eyes. “I never heard a man talk such nonsense in my life!”

      “My dear child,” said Lambert, with paternal melancholy, “when you’re my age—”

      “Which I sha’n’t be for the next fifteen years—” interrupted Francie.

      Mr. Lambert checked himself abruptly, and looked cross.

      “Oh, all right! If you’re going to sit on me every time I open my mouth, I’d better shut up.”

      Francie with some difficulty brought the black mare beside the chestnut, and put her hand for an instant on Lambert’s arm.

      “Ah now, don’t be angry with me!” she said with a glance whose efficacy she had often proved in similar cases; “you know I was only funning.”

      “I am not in the least angry with you,” replied Lambert coldly, though his eyes turned in spite of himself to her face.

      “Oh, I know very well you’re angry with me,” rejoined Francie, with unfeigned enjoyment of the situation; “your mustash always gets as black as a coal when you’re angry.”

      The adornment referred to twitched, but its owner said nothing.

      “There now, you’re laughing!” continued Francie, “but it’s quite true; I remember the first time I noticed that, was the time you brought Mrs. Lambert up to town about her teeth, and you took places at the Gaiety for the three of us—and oh! do you remember—” leaning back and laughing whole-heartedly, “she couldn’t get her teeth in in time, and you wanted her to go without any, and she wouldn’t, for fear she might laugh at the pantomime, and I had promised to go to the Dalkey Band that night with the Whittles, and then when you got up to our house and found you’d got the three tickets for nothing, you were so mad that when I came down into the parlour I declare I thought you’d been dyeing your mustash! Aunt Tish said afterwards it was because your face got so white, but I knew it was because you were in such a passion.”

      “Well, I didn’t like chucking away fifteen shillings a bit more than anyone else would,” said Lambert.

      “Ah, well, we made it up, d’ye remember?” said Francie, regarding him with a laughing eye, in which there was a suspicion of sentiment; “and after all, you were able to change the tickets to another night, and it was ‘Pinafore,’ and you laughed at me so awfully, because I cried at the part where the two lovers are saying good-bye to each other, and poor Mrs. Lambert got her teeth in in a hurry to go with us, and she couldn’t utter the whole night for fear they’d fall out.”

      Perhaps the allusions to his wife’s false teeth had a subtly soothing effect on Mr. Lambert. He never was averse to anything that showed that other people were as conscious as he was of the disparity between his own admirable personal equipment and that of Mrs. Lambert; it was another admission of the great fact that he had thrown himself away. His eyebrows and moustache became less truculent, he let himself down with a complacent sarcasm on Francie’s method of holding her whip, and, as they rode on, he permitted to himself the semi-proprietary enjoyment of an agent in pointing out boundaries, and landmarks, and improvements.

      They had ridden at first under a pale green arch of roadside trees, with fields on either side full of buttercups and dog-daisies, a land of pasture and sleek cattle, and neat stone walls. But in the second or third mile the face of the country changed. The blue lake that had lain in the distance like a long slab of lapis lazuli, was within two fields of them now, moving drowsily in and out of the rocks, and over the coarse gravel of its shore. The trees had dwindled to ragged hazel and thorn bushes; the fat cows of the comfortable farms round Lismoyle were replaced by lean, dishevelled goats, and shelves and flags of grey limestone began to contest the right of the soil with the thin grass and the wiry brushwood. We have said grey limestone, but that hard-worked adjective cannot at all express the cold, pure blueness that these boulders take, under the sky of summer. Some word must yet be coined in which neither blue nor lilac shall have the supremacy, and in which the steely purple of a pigeon’s breast shall not be forgotten.

      The rock was everywhere. Even the hazels were at last squeezed out of existence, and inland, over the slowly swelling hills, it lay like the pavement of some giant city, that had been jarred from its symmetry by an earthquake. A mile away, on the further side of this iron belt, a clump of trees rose conspicuously by the lake side, round a two-storied white house, and towards these trees the road wound its sinuous way. The grass began to show in larger and larger patches between the rocks, and the indomitable hazels crept again out of the crannies, and raised their low canopies over the heads of the browsing sheep and goats. A stream, brown with turf-mould, and fierce with battles with the boulders, made a boundary between the stony wilderness and the dark green pastures of Gurthnamuckla. It dashed under a high-backed little bridge with such excitement that the black mare, for all her intelligence, curved her neck, and sidled away from the parapet towards Lambert’s horse.

      Just beyond the bridge, a repulsive-looking old man was sitting on a heap of stones, turning over the contents of a dirty linen pouch. Beside him were an empty milk-can, and a black-and-white dog which had begun by trying to be a collie, and had relapsed into an indifferent attempt at a grey-hound. It greeted the riders with the usual volley of barking, and its owner let fall some of the coppers that he was counting over, in his haste to strike at it with the long stick that was lying beside him.

      “Have done! Sailor! Blasht yer sowl! Have done!” then, with honeyed obsequiousness, “yer honour’s welcome, Mr. Lambert.”

      “Is Miss Duffy in the house?” asked Lambert.

      “She is, she is, yer honour,” he answered, in the nasal mumble peculiar to his class, getting up and beginning to shuffle after the horses; “but what young lady is this at all? Isn’t she very grand, God bless her!”

      “She’s Miss Fitzpatrick, Miss Mullen’s cousin, Billy,” answered Lambert graciously; approbation could not come from a source too low for him to be susceptible to it.

      The old man came up beside Francie, and, clutching the skirt of her habit, blinked at her with sly and swimming eyes.

      “Fitzpatrick is it? Begob I knew her grannema well; she was a fine hearty woman, the Lord have mercy on her! And she never seen me without she’d give me a shixpence or maybe a shillin’.”

      Francie was skilled in the repulse of the Dublin beggar, but this ancestral precedent was something for which she was not prepared. The clutch tightened on her habit and the disgusting old face almost touched it, as Billy pressed close to her, mouthing out incomprehensible blessings and entreaties. She felt afraid of his red eyes and clawing fingers, and she turned helplessly to Lambert.

      “Here, be off now, Billy, you old fool!” he said; “we’ve had enough of you. Run and open the gate.”

      The farm-house, with its clump of trees, was close to them, and its drooping iron entrance-gate shrieked