The Real Charlotte. Ross Martin

he did not think that he had chosen the worst.

      Charlotte walked up to him as he stood leaning against a tree, and held out her hand.

      “How d’ye do, Mr. Dysart?” she said with marked politeness. All trace of combat had left her manner, and the smile with which she greeted him was sweet and capacious. “We haven’t seen you in Lismoyle since you came back from the West Indies.”

      Christopher Dysart let his eyeglass fall, and looked apologetic as he enclosed her well-filled glove in his long hand, and made what excuses he could for not having called upon Miss Mullen.

      “Since Captain Thesiger has got this new steam-launch I can’t call my soul my own; I’m out on the lake with him half the day, and the other half I spend with a nail-brush trying to get the blacks off.”

      He spoke with a hesitation that could hardly be called a stammer, but was rather a delaying before his sentences, a mental rather than a physical uncertainty.

      “Oh, that’s a very poor excuse,” said Charlotte with loud affability, “deserting your old friends for the blacks a second time! I thought you had enough of them in the last two years! And you know you promised—or your good mother did for you—that you’d come and photograph poor old Mrs. Tommy before she died. The poor thing’s so sick now we have to feed her with a baby’s bottle.”

      Christopher wondered if Mrs. Tommy were the cook, and was on the point of asking for further particulars, when Miss Mullen continued:

      “She’s the great-great-grandmother of all me cats, and I want you to immortalise her; but don’t come till after Monday, as I’d like to introduce you to my cousin, Miss Fitzpatrick; did you hear she was coming?”

      “Yes, Mr. Lambert told us she was to be here next week,” said Christopher, with an indescribable expression that was not quite amusement, but was something more than intelligence.

      “What did he say of her?”

      Christopher hesitated; somehow what he remembered of Mr. Lambert’s conversation was of too free and easy a nature for repetition to Miss Fitzpatrick’s cousin.

      “He—er—seemed to think her very—er—charming in all ways,” he said rather lamely.

      “So it’s talking of charming young ladies you and Roddy Lambert are when he comes to see you on estate business!” said Charlotte archly, but with a rasp in her voice. “When my poor father was your father’s agent, and I used to be helping him in the office, it was charming young cattle we talked about, and not young ladies.”

      Christopher laughed in a helpless way.

      “I wish you were at the office still, Miss Mullen; if anyone could understand the Land Act I believe it would be you.”

      At this moment there was an upheaval among the matrons; the long line rose and broke, and made for the grey stone house whose windows were flashing back the sunlight through the trees at the end of the lawn-tennis grounds. The tedious skirmish with midges, and the strain of inactivity, were alike over for the present, and the conscience of the son of the house reminded him that he ought to take Miss Mullen in to tea.

CHAPTER IV.

       Table of Contents

      There was consternation among the cats at Tally Ho Lodge; a consternation mingled with righteous resentment. Even the patriarchal Susan could scarcely remember the time that the spare bedroom had been anything else than an hospital, a nursery, and a secure parliament house for him and his descendants; yet now, in his old age, and when he had, after vast consideration of alternatives, allocated to himself the lowest shelf of the wardrobe as a sleeping place, he was evicted at a moment’s notice, and the folded-away bed curtains that had formed his couch were even now perfuming the ambient air as they hung out of the window over the hall door. Susan was too dignified to give utterance to his wounded feelings; he went away by himself, and sitting on the roof of the fowl-house, thought unutterable things. But his great-niece, Mrs. Bruff, could not emulate his stoicism. Followed by her five latest kittens, she strode through the house, uttering harsh cries of rage and despair, and did not cease from her lamentations until Charlotte brought the whole party into the drawing-room, and established them in the waste-paper basket.

      The worst part about the upheaval, as even the youngest and least experienced of the cats could see, was that it was irrevocable. It was early morning when the first dull blow of Norry’s broom against the wainscot had startled them with new and strange apprehension, and incredulity had grown to certainty, till the final moment when the sight of a brimming pail of water urged them to panic-struck flight. It may be admitted that Norry the Boat, who had not, as a rule, any special taste for cleanliness, had seldom enjoyed anything more than this day of turmoil, this routing of her ancient enemies. Miss Charlotte, to whom on ordinary occasions the offended cat never appealed in vain, was now bound by her own word. She had given orders that the spare room was to be “cleaned down,” and cleaned down it surely should be. It was not, strictly speaking, Norry’s work. Louisa was house and parlour-maid; Louisa, a small and sullen Protestant orphan of unequalled sluggishness and stupidity, for whose capacity for dealing with any emergency Norry had a scorn too deep for any words that might conveniently be repeated here. It was not likely that Louisa would be permitted to join in the ardours of the campaign, when even Bid Sal, Norry’s own special kitchen-slut and co-religionist, was not allowed to assist.

      Norry the Boat, daughter of Shaunapickeen, the ferryman (whence her title), and of Carroty Peg, his wife, was a person with whom few would have cared to co-operate against her will. On this morning she wore a more ferocious aspect than usual. Her roughly-waving hair, which had never known the dignity of a cap, was bound up in a blue duster, leaving her bony forehead bare; dust and turf-ashes hung in her grizzled eyebrows, her arms were smeared with black-lead, and the skirt of her dress was girt about her waist, displaying a petticoat of heavy Galway flannel, long thin legs, and enormous feet cased in countrymen’s laced boots. It was fifteen years now, Norry reflected, while she scrubbed the floor and scraped the candle drippings off it with her nails, since Miss Charlotte and the cats had come into the house, and since then the spare room had never had a visitor in it. Nobody had stayed in the house in all those years except little Miss Francie, and for her the cot had been made up in her great-aunt’s room; the old high-sided cot in which her grandmother had slept when she was a child. The cot had long since migrated into the spare room, and from it Norry had just ejected the household effects of Mrs. Bruff and her family, with a pleasure that was mitigated only by the thought that Miss Francie was a young woman now, and would be likely to give a good deal more trouble in the house than even in the days when she stole the cockatoo’s sopped toast for her private consumption, and christened the tom-cat Susan against everyone’s wishes except her great-aunt’s.

      Norry and the cockatoo were now the only survivors of the old régime at Tally Ho Lodge, in fact the cockatoo was regarded in Lismoyle as an almost prehistoric relic, dating, at the lowest computation, from the days when old Mrs. Mullen’s fox-hunting father had lived there, and given the place the name that was so remarkably unsuited to its subsequent career. The cockatoo was a sprightly creature of some twenty shrieking summers on the day that the two Miss Butlers, clad in high-waisted, low-necked gowns, were armed past his perch in the hall by their father, and before, as it seemed to the cockatoo, he had more than half-finished his morning doze, they were back again, this time on the arms of the two young men who, during the previous five months, had done so much to spoil his digestion by propitiatory dainties at improper hours. The cockatoo had no very clear recollection of the subsequent departure of Dr. Mullen and his brother, the attorney, with their brides, on their respective honeymoons, owing to the fact that Mr. Mullen, the agent, brother of the two bridegrooms, had prised open his beak, and compelled him to drink the healths of the happy couples in the strongest and sweetest whisky punch.

      The cockatoo’s memory after this climax was filled with vague comings and goings, extending over unknown tracts of time. He remembered two days of disturbance, on each