The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [19]
“Make Miss Fitzpatrick come in to tea on her way home, Roderick” she called, looking admiringly at the girl with kind eyes that held no spark of jealousy of her beauty and youth. Mrs. Lambert was one of the women who sink prematurely and unresistingly into the sloughs of middle-age. For her there had been no intermediary period of anxious tracking of grey hairs, of fevered energy in the playing of lawn-tennis and rounders; she had seen, with a feeling too sluggish to be respected as resignation, her complexion ascend the scale of colour from passable pink to the full sunset flush that now burned in her cheeks and spanned the sharp ridge of her nose; and she still, as she had always done, bought her expensive Sunday bonnet as she would have bought a piece of furniture, because it was handsome, not because it was becoming. The garden hat which she now wore could not pretend to either of these qualifications, and, as Francie looked at her, the contrast between her and her husband was as conspicuous as even he could have wished.
Francie’s first remark, however, after they had passed by, seemed to show that her point of view was not the same as his.
“Won’t she be very lonely there all the afternoon by herself?” she asked, with a backward glance at the figure in the garden hat.
“Oh, not she!” said Lambert carelessly, “she has the dog, and she’ll potter about there as happy as possible. She’s all right.” Then after a pause, in which the drift of Francie’s question probably presented itself to him for the first time, “I wish everyone was as satisfied with their life as she is”
“How bad you are!” returned Francie, quite unmoved by the gloomily sentimental roll of Mr. Lambert’s eyes. “I never heard a man talk such nonsense in my life!”
“My dear child,” said Lambert, with paternal melancholy, “when you’re my age—”
“Which I sha’n’t be for the next fifteen years—” interrupted Francie.
Mr. Lambert checked himself abruptly, and looked cross.
“Oh, all right! If you’re going to sit on me every time I open my mouth, I’d better shut up.”
Francie with some difficulty brought the black mare beside the chestnut, and put her hand for an instant on Lambert’s arm.
“Ah now, don’t be angry with me!” she said, with a glance whose efficacy she had often proved in similar cases, “you know I was only funning.”
“I am not in the least angry with you,” replied Lambert coldly, though his eyes turned in spite of himself to her face.
“Oh, I know very well you’re angry with me,” rejoined Francie, with unfeigned enjoyment of the situation; “your mustash always gets as black as a coal when you’re angry.”
The adornment referred to twitched, but its owner said nothing.
“There now, you’re laughing!” continued Francie, “but it’s quite true; I remember the first time I noticed, that was the time you brought Mrs. Lambert up to town about her teeth, and you took places at the Gaiety for the three of us—and oh! do you remember—” leaning back and laughing whole-heartedly, “she couldn’t get her teeth in in time, and you wanted her to go without any, and she wouldn’t, for fear she might laugh at the pantomime, and I had promised to go to the Dalkey Band that night with the Whittys, and then when you got up to our house and found you’d got the three tickets for nothing, you were so mad that when I came down into the parlour I declare I thought you’d been dyeing your mustash! Aunt Tish said afterwards it was because your face got so white, but I knew it was because you were in such a passion.”
“Well, I didn’t like chucking away fifteen shillings a bit more than anyone else would,” said Lambert.
“Ah, well, we made it up, d’ye remember,” said Francie, regarding him with a laughing eye, in which there was a suspicion of sentiment; “and after all you were able to change the tickets to another night, and it was ‘Pinafore,’ and you laughed at me so awfully, because I cried at the part where the two lovers are saying good-bye to each other, and poor Mrs. Lambert got her teeth in in a hurry to go with us, and she couldn’t utter the whole