The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [145]
Francie found the evening surprisingly pleasant. She was, as she had always been, entirely at her ease with Mr. Lambert, and did not endure, on his account any vicarious suffering because the table-cloth was far from clean, and the fact that Bridget put on the coal with her fingers was recorded on the edges of the plates. If he chose to come and eat hot cakes in the bosom of the Fitzpatrick family instead of dining at his hotel, he was just as well able to do without a butter-knife as she was, and, at all events, he need not have stayed unless he killed, she thought, with a little] flash of amusement and pride that her power over him, at least, was not lost. There had been times during the last month or two when she had believed that he, like everyone else, had forgotten her, and it was agreeable to find that she had been mistaken.
The next day proved to be one of the softest and sunniest of the winter, and, as they flew along the wet road towards the Dargle, on lthe smartest of the Bray outside cars, a great revival took place in Francie’s spirits. They left their car at the gate of the glen to which the Dargle river has given its name, and strolled together along the private road that runs from end to end of it. A few holiday-makers had been tempted down from Dublin by the fine day, but there was nothing that even suggested the noisy pleasure parties that vulgarise the winding beauty of the ravine on summer bank holidays.
“Doesn’t it look fearfful lonely to-day?” said Francie, who had made her last visit there as a member of one of these same pleasure parties, and had enjoyed herself hightly. “You can’t hear a thing but the running of the water.”
They were sitting on the low parapet of the road, looking sown the brown slope of the tree-tops to the river, that was running a foaming frace among the rocks at the bottom of the cleft.
“I don’t call it lonely,” said Lambert, casting a discontented side-long glance at a couple walking past arm-in-arm, evidently in the silently blissful stage of courtship; “how many more would you like?”
“Oh, lots,” replied Francie, “but I’m not going to tell you who they are!”
“I know one, anyhow,” said Lambert, deliberately leading up to a topic that up to this had been only slightly touched on.
When he had walked home from the church with Francie the evening before, he had somehow not been able to talk to her consecutively; he had felt a nervous awkwardness that he had not believed himself capable of, and the fact that he was holding an umbrella over her head and that she had taken his arm had seemed the only thing that he could give his mind to.
“Who do you know?”
Francie had plucked a ribbon of hart’s-tongue from the edge of the wall, and was drawing its cold satiny length across her lips.
“Wouldn’t you like it now if you saw—” he paused and looked at francie—”who shall we say—Charlotte Mullen coming up the road?”
“I wouldn’t care.”
“Wouldn’t you though! You’d run for your life, the way you did before out of Lismoyle,” said Lamnbert, looking hard at her and laughing not quite genuinely.
The strip of hart’s-tongue could not conceal a rising flow in the face behind it, but Francie’s voice was as undaunted as ever as she replied,
“Who told you I ran for my life?”
“You told me so yourslef.”
“I didn’t. I only told you I’d had a row with her.”
“Well, that’s as good as saying you had to run. You don’t suppose I thought you’d get the better of Charlotte?”
“I daresay you didn’t, because you’re afraid of her yourself!”
There was a degree of truth in this that made Mr. Lambert suddenly realise Francie’s improper levity about serious things.
“I’ll tell you one thing I’m afraid of,” he said severely, “and that is that you made a mistake in fighting with Charlotte. If you’d chosen to—to do as she wished, she’s easy enough to get on with.”
Francie flung her fern over the parapet and made no answer.
“I suppose you know she’s moved into Gurthnamuckla?” he went on.
“I