The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [31]
“Do y’ indeed?” said Francie, flashing a look at him of instant comprehension and complete sang froid. “I’ll lend the schoolmistress a hat-pin if you like! What on earth makes men so sleepy in church I don’t know,” she continued; “at our church in Dublin I used to be looking at them. All the gentlemen sit in the corner seat next the aisle, because they’re the most comfortable, y’ know, and from the minute the clergyman gives out the text—” she made a little gesture with her hand, showing thereby that half the buttons were off her glove— “they’re snoring!”
How young she was, and how pretty, and how inexpressibly vulgar. Christopher thought all these things in turn, while he did what in him lay to continue the conversation in the manner expected of him. The effort was perhaps not very successful, as, after a few minutes, it was evident that Francie was losing her first freedom of discourse, and was casting about for topics more appropriate to what she had heard of Mr. Dysart’s mental and literary standard.
“I hear you’re a great photographer, Mr. Dysart,” she began. “Miss Mullen says you promised to take a picture of her and her cats, and she was telling me to remind you of it. Isn’t it awfully clever of you to be able to do it?”
To this form of question reply is difficult, especially when it is put with all the good faith of complete ignorance. Christopher evaded the imbecilities of direct response.
“I shall think myself awfully clever if I photograph the cats,” he said.
“Clever!” she caught him up with a little shriek of laughter. “I can tell you you’ll want to be clever! Are you able to photograph up the chimney or under Norry’s bed? for that’s where they always run when a man comes into the house, and if you try to stop them they’d claw the face off you! Oh, they’re terrors!”
“It’s very good of you to tell me all this in time,” Christopher said, with a rather absent laugh. He was listening to Miss Mullen’s voice, and realising, for the first time, what it would be to live under the same roof with her and her cats; and yet this girl seemed quite light-hearted and happy. “Perhaps, on the whole, I’d better stay away?” he said, looking at her, and feeling in the sudden causeless way in which often the soundest conclusions are arrived at, how vast was the chasm between her ideal of life and his own, and linking with the feeling a pity that would have been self-sufficient if it had not also been perfectly simple.
“Ah! don’t say you won’t come and take the cats!” Francie exclaimed.
They reached the Tally Ho gate as she spoke, and the others were only a step or two in front of them. Charlotte looked over her shoulder with a benign smile.
“What’s this I hear about taking my cats?” she said jovially. “You’re welcome to everything in my house, Mr. Dysart, but I’ll set the police on you if you take my poor cats!”
“Oh, but I assure you—”
“He’s only going to photo them,” said Christopher and Francie together.
“Do you hear them, Miss Dysart?” continued Charlotte, fumbling for her latch key, “conspiring together to rob a poor lone woman of her only live stock!”
She opened the door, and as her visitors entered the hall they caught a glance of Susan’s large, stern countenance regarding them with concentrated suspicion through the rails of the staircase.
“My beauty-boy!” shouted his mistress, as he vanished upstairs. “Steal him if you can, Mr. Dysart.”
Miss Hope-Drummond looked rather more uninterested than is usual in polite society. When she had left the hammock, slung in the shade beside the tennis-ground at Bruff, it had not been to share Mr. Corkran’s hymn-book; still less had it been to walk from the church to Tally Ho between Pamela and a woman whom, from having regarded as merely outrée and incomprehensible, she had now come to look upon as rather impertinent. Irish society was intolerably mixed, she decided, as she sniffed the various odours of the Tally Ho hall, and, with some sub-connection of ideas, made up her mind that photography was a detestable and silly pursuit for men.