The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [74]
The door opened, and Christopher sauntered in; he looked round the room through his eye-glass, and then wandered towards the piano, where he sat down beside Pamela. Francie viewed this proceeding with less resentment than if he had been any other man in the world; she did not so much mind a neglect in which Miss Hope-Drummond was equally involved, and she was rather frightened than otherwise, when soon afterwards she saw him, in evident obedience to a hint from his sister, get up and come towards her with a large photograph-book under his arm. He sat down beside her, and, with what Pamela, watching from the distant piano, felt to be touching docility, began to expound its contents to her. He had done this thing so often before, and he knew, or thought he knew so well what people were going to say, that nothing but the unfailing proprietary interest in his own handiwork supported him on these occasions. He had not, however, turned many pages before he found that Francie’s comments were by no means of the ordinary tepid and perfunctory sort. The Oxford chapels were, it is true, surveyed by her in anxious silence; but a crowd of undergraduates leaning over a bridge to look at an eight—an instantaneous photograph of a bump-race, with its running accompaniment of maniacs on the bank—Christopher’s room, with Dinah sitting in his armchair with a pipe in her mouth—were all examined and discussed with fervid interest, and a cry of unfeigned excitement greeted the page on which his own photography made its début with a deep-brown portrait of Pamela.
“Mercy on us! That’s not Miss Dysart! What has she her face blackened for?”
“Oh, I did that when I did’nt know much about it last winter, and it’s rather over-exposed,” answered Christopher, regarding his work of art with a lenient parental eye.
“The poor thing! And was it the cold turned her black that way?”
Christopher glanced at his companion’s face to see whether this ignorance was genuine, but before he had time to offer the scientific explanation, she had pounced on a group below.
“Why, isn’t that the butler? Goodness! he’s the dead image of the Roman Emperors in Mangnall’s questions! And who are all the other people? I declare, one of them’s that queer man I saw in the hall with the old gentleman—” she stopped and stammered as she realised that she had touched on what must necessarily be a difficult subject.
“Yes, this is a photograph of the servants,” said Christopher, filling the pause with compassionate speed, “and that’s James Canavan. You’ll see him to-morrow night taking a leading part in Garry’s theatricals.”
“Why, d’ye tell me that man can act?”
“Act? I should think so!” he laughed as if at some recollection or other. “He can do anything he tries, or thinks he can. He began by being a sort of hedge-schoolmaster, but he was too mad to stick to it. Anyhow, my father took him up, and put him into the agency office, and now he’s his valet, and teaches Garry arithmetic when he’s at home, and writes poems and plays. I envy you your first sight of James Canavan on the boards,” he ended, laughing again.
“The boards!” Francie thought to herself; “I wonder is it like a circus?”
The photographs progressed serenely after this. Francie began to learn something of the discreetness that must be observed in inspecting amateur portrait photography, and Christopher, on his side, found he was being better entertained by Miss Mullen’s cousin than he could have believed possible. They turned page after page steadily and conversationally, until Christopher made a pause of unconscious pride and affection at a group of photographs of yachts in different positions.
“These are some of the best I have,” he said; “that’s my boat, and that is Mr. Lambert’s.”
“Oh, the nasty thing! I’m sure I don’t want to see her again! and I shouldn’t think you did