The Real Charlotte. Ross Martin

mainly occupied his mind was surprise that Nosey Fitzpatrick should have had such a pretty daughter. He was aware of Francie’s diffident glances, but thought they were due to his good looks and his new suit of clothes, and he became even more patronising than before. At last, quite unconsciously, he hit the dreaded point.

      “Well, and what do you think your aunt will say when she hears how I found you running away in the milk-cart?”

      “I don’t know,” replied Francie, getting very red.

      “Well, what will you say to me if I don’t tell her?”

      “Oh, Mr. Lambert, sure you won’t tell mamma!” entreated the Fitzpatrick children, faithful to their leader. “Francie’d be killed if mamma thought she was playing with Tommy Whitty!”

      They were nearing the Fitzpatrick mansion by this time, and Lambert stood still at the foot of the steps and looked down at the small group of petitioners with indulgent self-satisfaction.

      “Well, Francie, what’ll you do for me if I don’t tell?”

      Francie walked stiffly up the steps.

      “I don’t know.” Then with a defiance that she was far from feeling, “You may tell her if you like!”

      Lambert laughed easily as he followed her up the steps.

      “You’re very angry with me now, aren’t you? Well, never mind, we’ll be friends, and I won’t tell on you this time.”

CHAPTER II.

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      The east wind was crying round a small house in the outskirts of an Irish country town. At nightfall it had stolen across the grey expanse of Lough Moyle, and given its first shudder among the hollies and laurestinas that hid the lower windows of Tally Ho Lodge from the too curious passer-by, and at about two o’clock of the November night it was howling so inconsolably in the great tunnel of the kitchen chimney, that Norry the Boat, sitting on a heap of turf by the kitchen fire, drew her shawl closer about her shoulders, and thought gruesomely of the Banshee.

      The long trails of the monthly roses tapped and scratched against the window panes, so loudly sometimes that two cats, dozing on the rusty slab of a disused hothearth, opened their eyes and stared, with the expressionless yet wholly alert scrutiny of their race. The objects in the kitchen were scarcely more than visible in the dirty light of a hanging lamp, and the smell of paraffin filled the air. High presses and a dresser lined the walls, and on the top of the dresser, close under the blackened ceiling, it was just possible to make out the ghostly sleeping form of a cockatoo. A door at the end of the kitchen opened into a scullery of the usual prosaic, not to say odorous kind, which was now a cavern of darkness, traversed by twin green stars that moved to and fro as the lights move on a river at night, and looked like anything but what they were, the eyes of cats prowling round a scullery sink.

      The tall, yellow-faced clock gave the gurgle with which it was accustomed to mark the half-hour, and the old woman, as if reminded of her weariness, stretched out her arms and yawned loudly and dismally.

      She put back the locks of greyish-red hair that hung over her forehead, and, crouching over the fireplace, she took out of the embers a broken-nosed tea-pot, and proceeded to pour from it a mug of tea, black with long stewing. She had taken a few sips of it when a bell rang startlingly in the passage outside, jarring the silence of the house with its sharp outcry. Norry the Boat hastily put down her mug, and scrambled to her feet to answer its summons. She groped her way up two cramped flights of stairs that creaked under her as she went, and advanced noiselessly in her stockinged feet across a landing to where a chink of light came from under a door.

      The door was opened as she came to it, and a woman’s short thick figure appeared in the doorway.

      “The mistress wants to see Susan,” this person said in a rough whisper; “is he in the house?”

      “I think he’s below in the scullery,” returned Norry; “but, my Law! Miss Charlotte, what does she want of him? Is it light in her head she is?”

      “What’s that to you? Go fetch him at once,” replied Miss Charlotte, with a sudden fierceness. She shut the door, and Norry crept downstairs again, making a kind of groaning and lamenting as she went.

      Miss Charlotte walked with a heavy step to the fireplace. A lamp was burning dully on a table at the foot of an old-fashioned bed, and the high foot-board threw a shadow that made it difficult to see the occupant of the bed. It was an ordinary little shabby bedroom; the ceiling, seamed with cracks, bulged down till it nearly touched the canopy of the bed. The wall paper had a pattern of blue flowers on a yellowish background; over the chimney-shelf a filmy antique mirror looked strangely refined in the company of the Christmas cards and discoloured photographs that leaned against it. There was no sign of poverty, but everything was dingy, everything was tasteless, from the worn Kidderminster carpet to the illuminated text that was pinned to the wall facing the bed.

      Miss Charlotte gave the fire a frugal poke, and lit a candle in the flame provoked from the sulky coals. In doing so some ashes became embedded in the grease, and taking a hair-pin from the ponderous mass of brown hair that was piled on the back of her head, she began to scrape the candle clean. Probably at no moment of her forty years of life had Miss Charlotte Mullen looked more startlingly plain than now, as she stood, her squat figure draped in a magenta flannel dressing-gown, and the candle light shining upon her face. The night of watching had left its traces upon even her opaque skin. The lines about her prominent mouth and chin were deeper than usual; her broad cheeks had a flabby pallor; only her eyes were bright and untired, and the thick yellow-white hand that manipulated the hair-pin was as deft as it was wont to be.

      When the flame burned clearly she took the candle to the bedside, and, bending down, held it close to the face of the old woman who was lying there. The eyes opened and turned towards the overhanging face: small, dim, blue eyes, full of the stupor of illness, looking out of the pathetically commonplace little old face with a far-away perplexity.

      “Was that Francie that was at the door?” she said in a drowsy voice that had in it the lagging drawl of intense weakness.

      Charlotte took the tiny wrist in her hand, and felt the pulse with professional attention. Her broad, perceptive finger-tips gauged the forces of the little thread that was jerking in the thin network of tendons, and as she laid the hand down she said to herself, “She’ll not last out the turn of the night.”

      “Why doesn’t Francie come in?” murmured the old woman again in the fragmentary, uninflected voice that seems hardly spared from the unseen battle with death.

      “It wasn’t her you asked me for at all,” answered Charlotte. “You said you wanted to say good-bye to Susan. Here, you’d better have a sip of this.”

      The old woman swallowed some brandy and water, and the stimulant presently revived unexpected strength in her.

      “Charlotte,” she said, “it isn’t cats we should be thinking of now. God knows the cats are safe with you. But little Francie, Charlotte; we ought to have done more for her. You promised me that if you got the money you’d look after her. Didn’t you now, Charlotte? I wish I’d done more for her. She’s a good little thing—a good little thing—” she repeated dreamily.

      Few people would think it worth their while to dispute the wandering futilities of an old dying woman, but even at this eleventh hour Charlotte could not brook the revolt of a slave.

      “Good little thing!” she exclaimed, pushing the brandy bottle noisily in among a crowd of glasses and medicine bottles, “a strapping big woman of nineteen! You didn’t think her so good the time you had her here, and she put Susan’s father and mother in the well!”

      The old lady did not seem to understand what she had said.

      “Susan, Susan!” she called