The Real Charlotte. Ross Martin

her acquaintance.”

      She inclined her head as she spoke, and Francie, with much disposition to laugh, bowed hers in return; each instant Miss Duffy’s resemblance, both in feature and costume, to a beggar woman who frequented the corner of Sackville Street, was becoming harder to bear with fortitude, and she was delighted to leave Lambert to his tête-à-tête and ride out into the lawn, among the sycamores and hawthorns, where the black mare immediately fell to devouring grass with a resolve that was quite beyond Francie’s power to combat.

      She broke a little branch off a low-growing ash tree, to keep away the flies that were doing their best to spoil the pleasure of a perfect afternoon, and sat there, fanning herself lazily, while the mare, with occasional impatient tugs at the reins and stampings at the flies, cropped her way onwards from one luscious tuft to another. The Lismoyle grazier’s cattle had collected themselves under the trees at the farther end of the lawn, where a swampy pool still remained of the winter encroachments of the lake. In the sunshine at the other side of the wall, a chain of such pools stretched to the broad blue water, and grey limestone rocks showed above the tangle of hemlock and tall spikes of magenta foxgloves. A white sail stood dazzlingly out in the turquoise blue of a band of calm, and the mountains on the farther side of the lake were palely clothed in thinnest lavender and most ethereal green.

      It might have been the unexpected likeness that she had found in Julia Duffy to her old friend the beggar woman that took Francie’s thoughts away from this idyll of perfected summer to the dry, grey Dublin streets that had been her uttermost horizon a week ago. The milkman generally called at the Fitzpatricks’ house at about this hour; the clank of his pint measure against the area railings, even his pleasantries with Maggie the cook, relative to his bestowing an extra “sup for the cat,” were suddenly and sharply present with her. The younger Fitzpatrick children would be home from school, and would be raging through the kitchen seeking what they might devour in the interval before the six o’clock dinner, and she herself would probably have been engaged in a baking game of tennis in the square outside her uncle’s house. She felt very sorry for Aunt Tish when she thought of that hungry gang of sons and daughters and of the evil days that had come upon the excellent and respectable Uncle Robert, and the still more evil days that would come in another fortnight or so, when the whole bursting party had squeezed themselves into a little house at Bray, there to exist for an indefinite period on Irish stew, strong tea, and a diminished income. There was a kind of understanding that when they were “settled” she was to go back to them, and blend once more her five and twenty pounds a year with the Fitzpatrick funds; but this afternoon, with the rich summer stillness and the blaze of buttercups all about her, and the unfamiliar feeling of the mare’s restless shoulder under her knee, she was exceedingly glad that the settling process would take some months at least. She was not given to introspection, and could not have said anything in the least interesting about her mental or moral atmosphere; she was too uneducated and too practical for any self-communings of this kind; but she was quite certain of two things, that in spite of her affection for the Fitzpatricks she was very glad she was not going to spend the summer in Dublin or Bray, and also, that in spite of certain bewildering aspects of her cousin Charlotte, she was beginning to have what she defined to herself as “a high old time.”

      It was somewhere about this period in her meditations that she became aware of a slight swishing and puffing sound from the direction of the lake, and a steam-launch came swiftly along close under the shore. She was a smart-looking boat, spick and span as white paint and a white funnel with a brass band could make her, and in her were seated two men; one, radiant in a red and white blazer, was steering, while the other, in clothes to which even distance failed to lend enchantment, was menially engaged in breaking coals with a hammer. The boughs of the trees intervened exasperatingly between Francie and this glittering vision, and the resolve to see it fully lent her the power to drag the black mare from her repast, and urge her forward to an opening where she could see and be seen, two equally important objects.

      She had instantly realised that these were those heroes of romance, “the Lismoyle officers,” the probabilities of her alliance with one of whom had been the subject of some elegant farewell badinage on the part of her bosom friend, Miss Fanny Hemphill. Francie’s acquaintance with the British army had hitherto been limited to one occasion when, at a Sandymount evening band performance, “one of the officers from Beggars’ Bush Barracks”—so she had confided to Miss Hemphill—had taken off his hat to her, and been very polite until Aunt Tish had severely told him that no true gentleman would converse with a lady without she was presented to him, and had incontinently swept her home. She could see them quite plainly now, and from the fact that the man who had been rooting among the coals was now sitting up, evidently at the behest of the steersman, and looking at her, it was clear that she had attracted attention too. Even the black mare pricked her ears, and stared at this new kind of dragon-fly creature that went noisily by, leaving a feathery smear on the air behind it, and just then Mr. Lambert rode out of the stableyard, and looked about him for his charge.

      “Francie!” he called with perceptible impatience; “what are you at down there?”

      The steam-launch had by this time passed the opening, and Francie turned and rode towards him. Her hat was a good deal on the back of her head, and her brilliant hair caught the sunshine; the charm of her supple figure atoned for the crookedness of her seat, and her eyes shone with an excitement born of the delightful sight of soldiery.

      “Oh, Mr. Lambert, weren’t those the officers?” she cried, as he rode up to her; “which was which? Haven’t they a grand little steamer?”

      Lambert’s temper had apparently not been improved by his conversation with Julia Duffy; instead of answering Miss Fitzpatrick he looked at her with a clouded brow, and in his heart he said, “Damn the officers!”

      “I wonder which of them is the captain?” continued Francie; “I suppose it is the little fair one; he was much the best dressed, and he was making the other one do all the work?”

      Lambert gave a scornful laugh.

      “I’ll leave you to find that out for yourself. I’ll engage it won’t be long before you know all about them. You’ve made a good start already.”

      “Oh, very well,” replied Francie, letting fall both the reins in order to settle her hat; “some day you’ll be asking me something, and I won’t tell you, and then you’ll be sorry.”

      “Some day you’ll be breaking your neck, and then you’ll be sorry,” retorted Lambert, taking up the fallen reins.

      They rode out of the gate of Gurthnamuckla in silence, and after a mile of trotting, which was to Francie a period of mingled pain and anxiety, the horses slackened of their own accord, and began to pick their way gingerly over the smooth sheets of rock that marked the entry of the road into the stony tract mentioned in the last chapter. Francie took the opportunity for a propitiatory question.

      “What were you and the old woman talking about all that time? I thought you were never coming.”

      “Business,” said Lambert shortly; then viciously, “if any conversation with a woman can ever be called business.”

      “Oho! then you couldn’t get her to do what you wanted!” laughed Francie; “very good for you too! I think you always get your own way.”

      “Is that your opinion?” said Lambert, turning his dark eyes upon her; “I’m sorry I can’t agree with you.”

      The fierce heat had gone out of the afternoon as they passed along the lonely road, through the country of rocks and hazel bushes; the sun was sending low flashes into their eyes from the bright mirror of the lake; the goats that hopped uncomfortably about in the enforced and detested tête-à-tête caused by a wooden yoke across their necks, cast blue shadows of many-legged absurdity on the warm slabs of stone; a carrion crow, swaying on the thin topmost bough of a thorn-bush, a blot in the mellow afternoon sky, was looking about him if haply he could see a wandering kid whose eyes would serve him for his supper; and a couple of miles away, at Rosemount, Mrs. Lambert was sending down to be kept hot what she and Charlotte had left of the Sally Lunn.