The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [106]
“Must I hold on to the end?” he was saying, as the scissors advanced in leaps towards his fingers.
“I’ll kill you if you let go!” answered Francie, rather thickly, by reason of a pin between her front teeth. “Goodness, Mr. Lambert! you frightened the heels off me! I thought you were Louisa with the tea.”
“Good evening, Francie; good evening, Dysart,” said Lambert with solemn frigidity.
Christopher reddened a little as he looked round. “I’m afraid I can’t shake hands with you, Lambert,” with an unavoidably foolish laugh, “I’m dressmaking.”
“So I see,” replied Mr. Lambert, with something as near a sneer as he dared. He always felt it a special unkindness of Providence to have placed this young man to reign over him, and the practical sentiment that it is well not to quarrel with your bread and butter, had not unfrequently held him back from a much-desired jibe. “I came, Francie,” he went on with the same portentous politeness, “to see if you’d care to come for a ride with me.”
“When? Now?” said Francie, without much enthusiasm.
“Oh, not unless you like,” he replied, in a palpably offended tone.
“Well, how d’ye know I wouldn’t like? Keep quiet now, Mr. Dysart, I’ve another one for you to hold!”
“I’m afraid I must be going—” began Christopher, looking helplessly at the billows of pink cambric which surrounded him on the floor. Lambert’s arrival had suddenly made the situation seem vulgar.
“Ah, can’t you sit still now?” said Francie, thrusting another length of material into his hand, and beginning to cut swiftly towards him. “I declare you’re very idle!”
Lambert stood silent while this went on, and then, with an angry look at Francie, he said, “I understand then that you’re not coming out riding to-day?”
“Do you?” asked Francie, pinning the seam together with marvellous rapidity; “take care your understanding isn’t wrong! Have you the horse down here?”
“Of course I have.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what we’ll do; we’ll have tea first, and then we’ll ride back with Mr. Dysart; will that do you?”
“I wanted to ride in the opposite direction,” said Lambert, “I had some business—”
“Oh, bother your old business!” interrupted Francie, “anyway, I hear her bringing in the tea.”
“Oh, I hope you’ll ride home with me,” said Christopher, “I hate riding by myself.”
“Much I pity you!” said Francie, flashing a sidelong look at him as she went over to the tea-table; “I suppose you’d be frightened!”
“Quite so. Frightened and bored. That is what I feel like when I ride by myself,” said Christopher, trying to eliminate from his manner the constraint that Lambert’s arrival had imparted to it, “and my horse is just as bored; I feel apologetic all the time and wishing I could do something to amuse him that wouldn’t be dangerous. Do come; I’m sure he’d like it.”
“Oh, how anxious you are about him!” said Francie cutting bread and butter with a dexterous hand from the loaf that Louisa had placed on the table in frank confession of incapacity, “I don’t know what I’ll do till I’ve had my tea. Here now, here’s yours poured out for both of you; I suppose you’d like me to come and hand it to you!” with a propitiatory look at Lambert.
Thus adjured, the two men seated themselves at the table on which Francie had prepared their tea and bread and butter with a propriety that reminded Christopher of his nursery days. It was a very agreeable feeling, he thought; and as he docilely drank his tea and laughed at Francie for the amount of sugar that she put into hers, the idealising process to which he was unconsciously subjecting her advanced a stage. He was beginning to lose sight of her vulgarity, even to wonder at himself for ever having applied that crudely inappropriate word to her. She had some reflected vulgarities of course, thought the usually hypercritical Mr. Christopher Dysart, and her literary progress along the lines he had laid down for her was slow; but lately, since his missionary resolve to let the light of culture illuminate