The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [171]
“Oh, that’ll be very nice for you,” answered Francie still more cheerfully. “I suppose,” she went on with her most aristocratic drawl,”that you’ll be married before you go out?”
She had arranged the delivery of this thrust before she came downstairs, and it glided from her tongue as easily as she could have wished.
“Yes, I daresay I shall,” he answered defiantly, though the provokingly ready blush of fair man leaped to his face. He looked at her, angry with himself for reddening, and angrier with her for blazoning her indifference, by means of a question that seemed to him the height of bad taste and spitefulness. As he looked, the colour that burned in his own face repeated itself in hers with slow relentlessness; at the sight of it a sudden revulsion of feeling brought him dangeroulsy near to calling her by her name, with reproaches for her heartlessness, but before the word took form she had risen quickly, and, saying something incoherent about ordering tea, moved towards the bell, her head turned from him with the helpless action of a shy child.
Hawkins, hardly knowing what he was doing, started forward, and as he did so the door opened, and a well-known voice announced
“Miss Charlotte Mullen!”
The owner of the voice advanced into the room, and saw, as anyone must have seen, the flushed faces of its two occupants, and felt that nameless quality in the air that tells of interruption.
“I took the liberty of announcing myself,” she said, with her most affable smile; “I knew you were at home, as I saw Mr. Hawkins’ trap at the door, and I just walked in.”
As she shook hands and sat down she expanded easily into a facetious description of the difficulties of getting her old horse along the road from Gurthnamuckla, and by the time she had finished her story Hawkins’ complexion had regained its ordinary tone, and Francie had resumed the air of elegant nonchalance appropriate to the importance of the married state. Nothing, in fact, could have been more admirable than Miss Mullen’s manner. She praised Francie’s new chair covers and Indian tea; she complimented Mr. Hawkins on his new pony; even going so far as to reproach him for not having been out to Gurthnamuckla to see her, till Francie felt some pricks of conscience about the sceptical way that she and Lambert had laughed together over Charlotte’s amiability when she paid her first visit to them. She found inexpressible ease in the presence of a third person as capable as Charlotte of carrying on a conversation with the smallest possible assistance; shaltered by it she slowly recovered from her mental overthrow, and, furious as she was with Hawkins for his part in it, she was begnning to be able to patronise him again by the time that he got up to go away.
“Well, Francie, my dear child,” began Charlotte, as soon as the door had closed behind him, “I’ve scarcely had a word with you since you came home. You had such a reception the last day I was here that I had to content myself with talking to Mrs. Beattie, and hearing all about the price of underclothes. Indeed I had a good mind to tell her that only for your magnanimity she wouldn’t be having so much to say about Carrie’s trousseau!”
“Indeed she was welcome to him!” said Francie, putting her chin in the air, “that little wretch, indeed!”
It was one of the moments when she touched the extreme of satisfation in being married, and in order to cover, for her own and Charlotte’s sake, the remembrance of that idiotic blush, she assumed a little extra bravado.
“Talking of your late admirers—” went on Charlotte, “for I hope for poor Roody’s sake they’re not present ones—I never saw a young fellow so improved in his manners as Mr. Hawkins. There was a time I didn’t fancy him—as you may remember, though we’ve agreed to say nothing more about our old squabbles— but I think he’s chastened by adversity. That engagement, you know—” she paused, and cast a side-long, unobtrusive glance at Francie.