The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [61]
“And I suppose you’d adore to see her in one?”
“Of course I would!” She gave him a look that was equivalent to the wag of the tail with which a dog assures the obtuse human being that its worrying and growling are only play. “You might know that without being told. And now perhaps you’ll tell me how poor Mrs. Lambert is? I hear she was greatly upset by the fright she got about you, and indeed you’re not worthy of it.”
“She’s much better, thank you.”
He looked at Francie under his lowered lids, and tried to find it in his heart to wish that she could sometimes be a little more grown up and serious. She was leaning back with her hat crushed against a trunk of the tree, so that its brim made a halo round her face, and the golden green light that filtered through the leaves of the lime moved like water over her white dress. If he had ever heard the story of “Undine” it might have afforded him the comforting hypothesis that this delicate, cool, youthful creature, with her provoking charm, could not possibly be weighted with the responsibility of a soul; but an unfortunate lack of early culture denied to Mr. Lambert this excuse for the levity with which she always treated him—a man sixteen years older than she was, her oldest friend, as he might say, who had always been kind to her ever since she was a scut of a child. Her eyes were closed; but an occasional quiver of the long lashes told him that she had no intention of sleeping; she was only pretending to be tired, “out of tricks,” he thought angrily. He waited for a moment or two, and then he spoke her name. The corners of her mouth curved a little, but the eyelashes were not raised.
“Are you tired, or are you shamming?”
“Shamming,” was the answer, still with closed eyes.
“Don’t you think you could open your eyes?”
“No.”
Another short period of silence ensued, and the sound of summer in the air round them strengthened and deepened, as the colour strengthens and deepens in a blush. A wasp strayed in under the canopy of the lime and idled inquisitively about Francie’s hat and the bunch of mignonette in her belt, but she lay so still under this supreme test that Lambert thought she must be really asleep, and taking out his handkerchief prepared to rout the invader. At the same moment there came a sound of wheels and a fast-trotting horse on the road; it neared them rapidly, and Miss Fitzpatrick leaped to her feet and put aside the leaves of the lime just in time to see the back of Mr. Hawkins’ head as his polo-cart spun past the Tally Ho gate.
“I declare I thought it was Mr. Dysart,” she said, looking a little ashamed of herself; “I wonder where in the name of fortune is Mr. Hawkins going!”
“I thought you were so dead asleep you couldn’t hear anything,” said Lambert, with a black look; “he’s not coming here, anyhow.”
She dropped back into the corner of the seat again as if the start forward had tired her.
“Oh! I was so frightened at the wasp, and I wouldn’t let on!”
“I wonder why you’re always so unfriendly with me now,” began Lambert suddenly, fixing his eyes upon her; “there was once on a time when we were great friends, and you used to write to me, and you’d say you were glad to see me when I went up to town, but now you’re so set up with your Dysarts and your officers that you don’t think your old friends worth talking to.”
“Oh!” Francie sat up and faced her accuser valiantly, but with an inwardly-stricken conscience. “You know that’s a dirty, black lie!”
“I came over here this afternoon,” pursued Lambert, “very anxious about you, and wanting to tell you how sorry I was, and how I accused myself for what had happened—and how am I treated? You won’t so much as take the trouble to speak to me. I suppose if I was one of your swell new friends—Christopher Dysart, for instance, who you are looking out for so hard—it would be a very different story.”
By the time this indictment was delivered, Francie’s face had more colour in it than it had known for some days; she kept her eyes