The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [132]
“Roddy Lambert!” cried Francie, bursting out into shrill unpleasant laughter; “I think I’ll try and do better than that, thank ye, though you’re so kind in making him a present to me!” then, firing a random shot; “I’ll not deprive you of him, Charlotte, you may keep him all to yourself!”
It is quite within the bounds of possibility that Charlotte might at this juncture have struck Francie, and thereby have put herself for ever into a false position, but her guardian angel, in the shape of Susan, the grey tom-cat, intervened. He had jumped in at the window during the discussion, and having rubbed himself unnoticed against Charlotte’s legs with stiff, twitching tail, and cold eyes fixed on her face, he, at this critical instant, sprang upwards at her, and clawed on to the bosom of her dress, hanging there in expectation of the hand that should help him to the accustomed perch on his mistress’s shoulder. The blow that was so near being Francie’s descended upon the cat’s broad confident face and hurled him to the ground. He bolted out of the window again, and when he was safely on the gravel walk, turned and looked back with an expression of human anger and astonishment.
When Charlotte spoke her voice was caught away from her as Christopher Dysart’s had been the day before. All the passions have but one instrument to play on when they wish to make themselves heard, and it will yield but a broken sound when it is too hardly pressed.
“Dare to open your mouth to me again, and I’ll throw you out of the window after the cat!” was what she said in that choking whisper. “Ye can go out of this house to-morrow and see which of your lovers will keep ye the longest, and by the time that they’re tired of ye, maybe ye’ll regret that your impudence got ye turned out of a respectable house!” She turned at the last word, and, like a madman who is just sane enough to fear his own madness, flung out of the room without another glance at her cousin.
Susan sat on the gravel path, and in the intervals of licking his paws in every crevice and cranny, surveyed his mistress’s guest with a stony watchfulness as she leaned her head against the window-sash and shook in a paroxysm of sobs.
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CHAPTER XXXV.
More than the half of September had gone by. A gale or two had browned the woods, and the sky was beginning to show through the trees a good deal. Miss Greely removed the sun-burned straw hats from her window, and people lighted their fires at afternoon tea-time, and daily said to each other, with sapient gloom, that the evenings were closing in very much. The summer visitors had gone, and the proprietors of lodgings had moved down from the attics to the front parlours, and were restoring to them their usual odour of old clothes, sour bread, and apples. All the Dysarts, with the exception of Sir Benjamin, were away; the Bakers had gone to drink the waters at Lisdoonvarna; the Beatties were having their yearly outing at the Sea Road in Galway; the Archdeacon had exchanged duties with an English cleric, who was married, middle-aged, and altogether unadvantageous, and Miss Mullen played the organ, and screamed the highest and most ornate tunes, in company with the attenuated choir.
The barracks kept up an outward seeming of life and cheerfulness, imparted by the adventitious aid of red coats and bugle-blowing, but their gaiety was superficial, and even upon Cursiter, steam-launching to nowhere in particular and back again, had begun to pall. He looked forward to his subaltern’s return with an eagerness quite out of proportion to Mr. Hawkins’ gifts of conversation or companionship; solitude and steam-launching were all very well in moderation, but he could not get the steam-launch in after dinner to smoke a pipe, and solitude tended to unsettling reflections on the vanity of his present walk of life. Hawkins, when he came, was