The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [104]
Even Charlotte’s strong brain reeled in the attempt to follow the arguments of Eliza the cook and Mrs. Lambert,
“Well, upon my word, Lucy, it’s little I’d have argued with her. I’d have just said to her, ‘Out of my house you march, if you don’t go to your church!’ I think that would have composed her religious scruples.”
“Oh! but, Charlotte,” pleaded the turkey-hen, “I couldn’t part her; she knows just what gentlemen like, and Roderick’s so particular about savouries. When I told him about her, he said he wouldn’t care if she was a Mormon and had a dozen husbands, so long as she made good soup.”
Charlotte laughed out loud. Mr. Lambert’s turn of humour had a robustness about it that always roused a sympathetic chord in her.
“Well, that’s a man all over! His stomach before anyone else’s soul!”
“Oh, Charlotte, you shouldn’t say such things! Indeed, Roderick will often take only the one cut of meat at his dinner these times, and if it isn’t to his liking he’ll take nothing; he’s a great epicure. I don’t know what’s over him those last few weeks,” continued Mrs. Lambert gloomily, “unless it’s the hot weather, and all the exercise he’s taking that’s making him cross.”
“Well, from all I’ve ever seen of men,” said Charlotte, with a laugh, “the hotter they get the better pleased they are. Take my word for it, there’s no time a man’s so proud of himself as when he’s ‘larding the lean earth!’”
Mrs. Lambert looked bewildered, but was too much affaired with her own thoughts to ask for an explanation of what seemed to her a strange term in cookery.
“Did he know Francie Fitzpatrick much in Dublin?” she said after a pause, in which she had given a saucerful of cream and sopped cake to her dog.
Charlotte looked at her hostess suddenly and searchingly as she stooped with difficulty to take up the saucer.
“He’s known her since she was a child,” she replied, and waited for further developments.
“I thought it must be that way,” said Mrs. Lambert, with a dissatisfied sound in her voice; “they’re so very familiar-like talking to each other.”
Charlotte’s heart paused for an instant in its strong, regular course. Was it possible, she thought, that wisdom was being perfected in the mouth of Lucy Lambert?
“I never noticed anything so wonderfully familiar,” she said, in a tone meant to provoke further confidence; “I never knew Roddy yet that he wasn’t civil to a pretty girl; and as for Francie, any man comes handy to her! Upon my word, she’d dote on a tongs, as they say!”
Mrs. Lambert fidgeted nervously with her long gold watch chain. “Well, Charlotte,” she said, a little defiantly, “I’ve been married to him five years now, and I’ve never known him particular with any girl.”
“Then, my dear woman, what’s this nonsense you’re talking about him and Francie?” said Charlotte, with Mephistophelian gaiety.
“Oh, Charlotte!” said Mrs. Lambert, suddenly getting very red, and beginning to whimper, “I never thought to speak of it—” she broke off and began to root for her handkerchief, while her respectable middle-aged face began to wrinkle up like a child’s, “and, indeed, I don’t want to say anything against the girl, for she’s a nice girl, and so I’ve always found her, but I can’t help noticing—” she broke off again.
“What can’t ye help noticing?” demanded Charlotte roughly.
Mrs. Lambert drew a long breath that was half-suffocated by a sob. “Oh, I don’t know,” she cried helplessly; “he’s always going down to Tally Ho, by the way he’ll take her out riding or boating or something, and though he doesn’t say much, a little thing’ll slip out now and again, and you can’t say a word to him but he’ll get cross.”
“Maybe he’s in trouble about money unknown to