The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [126]
Christopher’s heart throbbed at the bitterness in a voice that he had always known so wholly careless and undisturbed; it increased his pity for her a thousandfold, but it stirred him with a strange and selfish pleasure to think that she had suffered. Whatever it was that was in her mind, it had given him a glimpse of that deeper part of her nature, so passionately guessed at, so long unfindable. He did not for an instant think of Hawkins, having explained away that episode to himself some time before in the light of his new reading of Francie’s character; it was Charlotte’s face as she confronted Mary Norris in the market that came to him, and the thought of what it must be to be under her roof and dependent on her. He saw now the full pain that Francie bore in hearing herself proclaimed as the lure by which he was to be captured, and that he should have brought her thus low roused a tenderness in him that would not be gainsaid.
“I don’t think it,” he said, stammering; “you might believe that I think more about you than other people do. I know you feel things more than you let anyone see, and that makes it all the worse for anyone who—who is sorry for you, and wants to tell you so—”
This halting statement, so remarkably different in diction from the leisurely sentences in which Christopher usually expressed himself, did not tend to put Francie more at her ease. She reddened slowly and painfully as his short-sighted, grey eyes rested upon her. Hawkins filled so prominent a place in her mind that Christopher’s ambiguous allusions seemed to be directed absolutely at him, and her hand instinctively slipped into her pocket and clasped the letter that was there, as if in that way she could hold her secret fast.
“Ah, well,”—she tried to say it lightly—”I don’t want so very much pity yet awhile; when I do, I’ll ask you for it!”
She disarmed the words of their flippancy by the look with which she lifted her dark-lashed eyes to him, and Christopher’s last shred of common sense sank in their tender depths and was lost there.
“Is that true?” he said, without taking his eyes from her face. “Do you really trust me? would you promise always to trust me?”
“Yes, I’m sure I’d always trust you,” answered Francie, beginning in some inexplicable way to feel frightened; “I think you’re awfully kind.”
“No, I am not kind,” he said, turning suddenly very white, and feeling his blood beating down to his finger-tips; “you must not say that when you know it’s—” Something seemed to catch in his throat and take his voice away. “It gives me the greatest pleasure to do anything for you,” he ended lamely.
The clear crimson deepened in Francie’s checks. She knew in one startling instant what Christopher meant, and her fingers twined and untwined themselves in the crochet sofa-cover as she sat, not daring to look at him, and not knowing in the least what to say.
“How can I be kind to you?” went on Christopher, his vacillation swept away by the look in her downcast face that told him she understood him; “it’s just the other way, it’s you who are kind to me. If you only knew what happiness it is to me—to—to be with you—to do anything on earth for you—you know what I mean—I see you know what I mean.”
A vision rose up before Francie of her past self, loitering about the Dublin streets, and another of an incredible and yet possible future self, dwelling at Bruff in purple and fine linen, and then she looked up and met Christopher’s eyes. She saw the look of tortured uncertainty and avowed purpose that there was no mistaking; Bruff and its glories melted away before it, and in their stead came Hawkins’ laughing face, his voice, his touch, his kiss, in overpowering contrast to the face opposite to her, with its uncomprehended intellect and refinement, and its pale anxiety.
“Don’t say things like that to me, Mr. Dysart,” she said tremulously; “I know how good you are to me, twice, twice too good,