The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [184]
The accurate balance of the sentence and its nasal cadence showed that Charlotte was delivering herself of a well-studied peroration. Her voice clashed with the stillness as dissonantly as the clamour of the young herons. Her face was warm and shiny, and Christopher looked away from it, and said to himself that she was intolerable.
“Of course—yes—I understand—” he answered stammeringly, her pause compelling him to speak; “but these are very serious things to say—”
“Serious!” Charlotte dived her hand into her pocket to make sure that her handkerchief was within hail. “D’ye think, Sir Christopher, I don’t know that well! I that have lain awake crying every night since I heard of it, not knowing how to decide between me affection for me friend and my duty to the son of my dear father’s old employer!”
“I think anyone who makes charges of this kind,” interrupted Christopher coldly, “is bound to bring forward something more definite than mere suspicion.”
Charlotte took her hand out of her pocket without the handkerchief, and laid it for a moment on Christopher’s arm.
“My dear Sir Christopher, I entirely agree with you,” she said in her most temperate, gentlemanlike manner, “and I am prepared to place certain facts before you, on whose accuracy you may perfectly rely, although circumstances prevent my telling you how I learned them.”
The whole situation was infinitely repugnant to Christopher. He would himself have said that he had not nerve enough to deal with Miss Mullen; and joined with this, and his innate and overstrained dislike of having his affairs discussed, was the unendurable position of conniving with her at a treachery. Little as he liked Lambert, he sided with him now with something more than a man’s ordinary resentment against feminine espionage upon another man. He was quite aware of the subdued eagerness in Charlotte’s manner, and it mystified while it disgusted him; but he was also aware that nothing short of absolute flight would check her disclosures. He could do nothing now but permit himself the single pleasure of staring over her head with a countenance barren of response to her histrionic display of expression.
“You ask me for something more definite than mere suspicion,” continued Charlotte, approaching one of the supremest gratifications of her life with full and luxurious recognition. “I can give you two facts, and if, on investigation, you find they are not correct, you may go to Roderick Lambert, and tell him to take an action for libel against me! I daresay you know that a tenant of yours, named James M’Donagh—commonly called Shamus Bawn—recently got the goodwill of Knocklara, and now holds it in addition to his father’s farm, which he came in for last month.” Christopher assented. “Jim M’Donagh paid one hundred and eighty pounds fine on getting Knocklara. I ask you to examine your estate account, and you will see that the sum credited to you on that transaction is no more than seventy.”
“May I ask how you know this?” Christopher turned his face towards her for a moment as he asked the question, and encountered, with even more aversion than he had expected, her triumphing eyes.
“I’m not at liberty to tell you. All I say is, go to Jim M’Donagh, and ask him the amount of his fine, and see if he won’t tell you just the same sum that I’m telling you now.”
Captain Cursiter, at this moment steering the Serpolette daintily among the shadows of Bruff Bay, saw the two incongruous figures on the turf-quay, one short, black, and powerful, the other tall, white, and passive, and wondered, through the preoccupation of crawling to his anchorage, what it was that Miss Mullen was holding forth to Dysart about, in a voice that came to him across the water like the gruff barking of a dog. He thought, too, that there was an almost ship-wrecked welcome in the shout with which Christopher answered his whistle, and was therefore surprised to see him remain where he was, apparently enthralled by Miss Mullen’s conversation, instead