The Real Charlotte. Ross Martin

extended jaw spoke of nothing but her determination to out-scream everyone else; Miss Hope-Drummond and the curate, on the bench in front of him, were singing primly out of the same hymn-book, the curate obviously frightened, Miss Hope-Drummond as obviously disgusted. The Misses Beattie were furtively eyeing Miss Hope-Drummond’s costume; Miss Kathleen Baker was openly eyeing the curate, whose hymn-book she had been wont to share at happier choir practices, and Miss Fitzpatrick, seated at the end of the row, was watching from the gallery window with unaffected interest the progress of the usual weekly hostilities between Pamela’s dachshund and the sexton’s cat, and was not even pretending to occupy herself with the business in hand. Christopher’s eyes rested on her appraisingly, with the minute observation of short sight, fortified by an eyeglass, and was aware of a small head with a fluffy halo of conventionally golden hair, a straight and slender neck, and an appleblossom curve of cheek; he found himself wishing that she would turn a little further round.

      The hymn had seven verses, and Pamela and Mrs. Gascogne were going inexorably through them all; the school-master and schoolmistress, an estimable couple, sole prop of the choir on wet Sundays, were braying brazenly beside him, and this was only the second hymn. Christopher’s D sharp melted into a yawn, and before he could screen it with his hymn-book, Miss Fitzpatrick looked round and caught him in the act. A suppressed giggle and a quick lift of the eyebrows instantly conveyed to him that his sentiments were comprehended and sympathised with, and he as instantly was conscious that Miss Mullen was following the direction of her niece’s eye. Lady Dysart’s children did not share her taste for Miss Mullen; Christopher vaguely felt some offensive flavour in the sharp smiling glance in which she included him and Francie, and an unexplainable sequence of thought made him suddenly decide that her niece was as second-rate as might have been expected.

      Never had the choir dragged so hopelessly; never had Mrs. Gascogne and Pamela compelled their victims to deal with so many and difficult tunes, and never at any previous choir practice had Christopher registered so serious a vow that under no pretext whatever should Pamela entice him there again. They were all sitting down now, while the leaders consulted together about the Kyrie, and the gallery cushions slowly turned to stone in their well-remembered manner. Christopher’s ideas of church-going were inseparably bound up with those old gallery cushions. He had sat upon them ever since, as a small boy, he had chirped a treble beside his governess, and he knew every knob in their anatomy. There is something blighting to the devotional tendencies in the atmosphere of a gallery. He had often formulated this theory for his own exculpation, lying flat on his back in a punt in some shady backwater, with the Oxford church bells reminding him reproachfully of Lismoyle Sundays, and of Pamela—the faithful, conscientious Pamela—whipping up the pony to get to church before the bell stopped. Now, after a couple of months’ renewed acquaintance with the choir, the theory had hardened into a tedious truism, and when at last Christopher’s long legs were free to carry him down the steep stairs, the malign influence of the gallery had brought their owner to the verge of free thought.

      He did not know how it had happened or by whose disposition of the forces it had been brought about, but when Miss Mullen’s tea-party detached itself from the other members of the choir at the churchyard gate, Pamela and Miss Hope-Drummond were walking on either side of their hostess, and he was behind with Miss Fitzpatrick.

      “You don’t appear very fond of hymns, Mr. Dysart,” began Francie at once, in the pert Dublin accent that, rightly or wrongly, gives the idea of familiarity.

      “People aren’t supposed to look about them in church,” replied Christopher with the peculiar suavity which, combined with his disconcerting infirmity of pausing before he spoke, had often baffled the young ladies of Barbadoes, and had acquired for him the reputation, perhaps not wholly undeserved, of being a prig.

      “Oh, I daresay!” said Francie, “I suppose that’s why you sit in the back seat, that no one’ll see you doing it!”

      There was a directness about this that Lismoyle would not have ventured on, and Christopher looked down at his companion with an increase of interest.

      “No; I sit there because I can go to sleep.”

      “Well, and do you? and who do you get to wake you?”—her quick voice treading sharply on the heels of his quiet one. “I used always to have to sit beside Uncle Robert in church to pinch him at the end of the sermon.”

      “I find it very hard to wake at the end of the sermon too,” remarked Christopher, with an experimental curiosity to see what Miss Mullen’s unexpected cousin would say next.

      “Do y’ indeed?” said Francie, flashing a look at him of instant comprehension and complete sang froid. “I’ll lend the schoolmistress a hat-pin if you like! What on earth makes men so sleepy in church I don’t know,” she continued; “at our church in Dublin I used to be looking at them. All the gentlemen sit in the corner seat next the aisle, because they’re the most comfortable, y’ know, and from the minute the clergyman gives out the text—” she made a little gesture with her hand, showing thereby that half the buttons were off her glove—“they’re snoring!”

      How young she was, and how pretty, and how inexpressibly vulgar! Christopher thought all these things in turn, while he did what in him lay to continue the conversation in the manner expected of him. The effort was perhaps not very successful, as, after a few minutes, it was evident that Francie was losing her first freedom of discourse, and was casting about for topics more appropriate to what she had heard of Mr. Dysart’s mental and literary standard.

      “I hear you’re a great photographer, Mr. Dysart,” she began. “Miss Mullen says you promised to take a picture of her and her cats, and she was telling me to remind you of it. Isn’t it awfully clever of you to be able to do it?”

      To this form of question reply is difficult, especially when it is put with all the good faith of complete ignorance. Christopher evaded the imbecilities of direct response.

      “I shall think myself awfully clever if I photograph the cats,” he said.

      “Clever!” she caught him up with a little shriek of laughter. “I can tell you you’ll want to be clever! Are you able to photograph up the chimney or under Norry’s bed? for that’s where they always run when a man comes into the house, and if you try to stop them they’d claw the face off you! Oh, they’re terrors!”

      “It’s very good of you to tell me all this in time,” Christopher said, with a rather absent laugh. He was listening to Miss Mullen’s voice, and realising, for the first time, what it would be to live under the same roof with her and her cats; and yet this girl seemed quite light-hearted and happy. “Perhaps, on the whole, I’d better stay away?” he said, looking at her, and feeling in the sudden causeless way in which often the soundest conclusions are arrived at, how vast was the chasm between her ideal of life and his own, and linking with the feeling a pity that would have been self-sufficient if it had not also been perfectly simple.

      “Ah! don’t say you won’t come and take the cats!” Francie exclaimed.

      They reached the Tally Ho gate as she spoke, and the others were only a step or two in front of them. Charlotte looked over her shoulder with a benign smile.

      “What’s this I hear about taking my cats?” she said jovially. “You’re welcome to everything in my house, Mr. Dysart, but I’ll set the police on you if you take my poor cats!”

      “Oh, but I assure you—”

      “He’s only going to photo them,” said Christopher and Francie together.

      “Do you hear them, Miss Dysart?” continued Charlotte, fumbling for her latch key, “conspiring together to rob a poor lone woman of her only live stock!”

      She opened the door, and as her visitors entered the hall they caught a glance of Susan’s large, stern countenance regarding them with concentrated suspicion through the rails of the staircase.

      “My beauty-boy!” shouted his mistress, as he vanished upstairs. “Steal him if you can, Mr. Dysart!”

      Miss