The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [81]
“I hope your dress did not suffer last night, Miss Fitzpatrick? Mine was ruined, but that was because Mr. Dysart would make me climb on to the box for the last scene.”
“No, thank you, Miss Hope-Drummond—at least, it only got a little sign of dust.”
“Really? How nice! How lucky you were, weren’t you?”
“She may have been lucky about her dress,” interrupted Garry, “but I’m blowed if she could have seen much of the acting! Why on earth did you let Hawkins jam you into that old brougham, Miss Fitzpatrick?”
“Garry,” said Lady Dysart with unusual asperity, “how often am I to tell you not to speak of grown-up gentlemen as if they were little boys like yourself? Run off to your lessons. If you have finished, Miss Fitzpatrick,” she continued, her voice chilling again, “I think we will go into the drawing-room.”
It is scarcely to be wondered at that Francie found the atmosphere of the drawing-room rather oppressive. She was exceedingly afraid of her hostess; her sense of her misdoings was, like a dog’s, entirely shaped upon other people’s opinions, and depended in no way upon her own conscience; and she had now awakened to a belief that she had transgressed very badly indeed. “And if she” (“she” was Lady Dysart, and for the moment Francie’s standard of morality) “was so angry about me sitting in the brougham with him,” she thought to herself, as, having escaped from the house, she wandered alone under the oaks of the shady back avenue, “what would she think if she knew the whole story?”
In Francie’s society “the whole story” would have been listened to with extreme leniency, if not admiration; in fact, some episodes of a similar kind had before now been confided by our young lady to Miss Fanny Hemphill, and had even given her a certain standing in the eyes of that arbiter of manners and morals. But on this, as on a previous occasion, she did not feel disposed to take Miss Hemphill into her confidence. For one thing, she was less distinct in her recollection of what had happened than was usual. It had seemed to her that she had lost her wonted clear and mocking remembrance of events from the moment when he had taken her hand, and what followed was blurred in her memory as a landscape is blurred by the quiver of heat in the air. For another, she felt it all to be so improbable, so uncertain, that she could not quite believe in it herself. Hawkins was so radically different from any other man she had ever known; so much more splendid in all ways, the very texture of his clothes, the scent on his handkerchief, breathed to her his high estate. That she should have any part in this greatness was still a little beyond belief, and as she walked softly in the deep grass under the trees, she kept saying to herself that he could not really care for her, that it was too good to be true.
It was almost pathetic that this girl, with her wildrose freshness and vivid spring-like youth, should be humble enough to think that she was not worthy of Mr. Hawkins, and sophisticated enough to take his love-making as a matter of common occurrence, that in no way involved anything more serious. Whatever he might think about it, however, she was certain that he would come here to-day, and being wholly