The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [52]
“Oh, Mr. Dysart! are you drowned?” she screamed ecstatically.
“Not quite,” he called back, his hair hanging in dripping points on his forehead as he took off his cap and shook the water out of it. “I say, Lambert, it’s beginning to blow pretty stiff; I’d take that top-sail off her, if I were you.”
“She’s often carried it in worse weather than this,” returned Lambert; “a drop of water will do no one any harm.”
Mr. Lambert in private, and as much as possible in public, affected to treat his employer’s son as a milksop, and few things annoyed him more than the accepted opinion on the lake that there was no better man in a boat than Christopher Dysart. His secret fear that it was true made it now all the more intolerable that Christopher should lay down the law to him on a point of seamanship, especially with Francie by, ready in that exasperating way of hers to laugh at him on the smallest provocation.
“It’ll do him no harm if he does get a drop of water over him,” he said to her in a low voice, forgetting for the moment his attitude of disapproval. “Take some of the starch out of him for once!” He took a pull on the main sheet, and, with a satisfied upward look at the top-sail in question, applied himself to conversation. The episode had done him good, and it was with almost fatherly seriousness that he began:
“Now, Francie, you were telling me a while ago that I was cross all day. I’m a very old friend of yours, and I don’t mind saying that I was greatly put out by the way”—he lowered his voice—”by the way you were going on with that fellow Hawkins.”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘going on,’” interrupted Francie, with a slight blush. “What’s the harm in talking to him if he likes to talk to me?”
“Plenty of harm,” returned Lambert quickly, “when he makes a fool of you the way he did to-day. If you don’t care that Miss Dysart and the rest of them think you know no better than to behave like that, I do!”
“Behave like what?”
“Well, for one thing, to let him and Garry Dysart go sticking grass in your stockings that way after luncheon; and for another to keep Miss Dysart waiting tea for you for half an hour, and your only excuse to be to tell her that he was ‘teaching you to make ducks and drakes’ the other side of the island.” The fatherly quality had died out of his voice, and the knuckles of the hand that held the tiller grew white from a harder grip.
Francie instinctively tucked away her feet under her petticoats. She was conscious that the green pattern still adorned her insteps, and that tell-tale spikes of grass still projected on either side of her shoes.
“How could I help it? It was just a silly game that he and Garry Dysart made up between them; and as for Miss Dysart being angry with me, she never said a word to me; she was awfully good; and she and her brother had kept the teapot hot for me, and everything.” She looked furtively at Christopher, who was looking out at the launch, now crossing their path some distance ahead. It was more than you’d have done for me!”
“Yes, very likely it was; but I wouldn’t have been laughing at you in my sleeve all the time as they were, or at least as he was, anyhow!”
“I believe that’s a great lie,” said Francie unhesitatingly; “and I don’t care a jack-rat what he thought, or what you think either. Mr. Hawkins is a very nice young man, and I’ll talk to him just as much as I like! And he’s coming to tea at Tally Ho to-morrow; and what’s more, I asked him! So now!”
“Oh, all right!” said Lambert, in such a constrained voice of anger, that even Francie felt a little afraid of him. “Have him to tea by all means; and if I were you I should send down to Limerick and have Miss M’Carthy up to meet him!”
“What are you saying? Who’s Miss M’Carthy?” asked Francie, with a disappointing sparkle