The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [93]
It is not to be wondered at, that, as Francie drove through Lismoyle, she felt that the atmosphere was laden with reprobation of her and her conduct.
Her instinct told her that the accident to Captain Cursiter’s launch, and her connection with it, would be a luscious topic of discourse for everyone, from Mrs. Lambert downwards; and the thought kept her from deriving full satisfaction from the Bruff carriage and pair. Even when she saw Annie Beattie standing at her window with a duster in her hand, the triumph of her position was blighted by the reflection that if Charlotte did not know everything before the afternoon was out, full details would be supplied to her at the party to which on this very evening they had been bidden by Mrs. Beattie.
The prospect of the cross-examination which she would have to undergo grew in portentousness during the hour and a half of waiting at Tally Ho for her cousin’s return, while through and with her fears the dirt and vulgarity of the house and the furniture, the sickly familiarities of Louisa, and the all-pervading smell of cats and cooking, impressed themselves on her mind with a new and repellent vigour. But Charlotte, when she arrived, was evidently still in happy ignorance of the events that would have interested her so profoundly. Her Dublin dentist had done his spiriting gently, her friends had been so hospitable that her lodging-house breakfasts had been her only expense in the way of meals, and the traditional battle with the Lismoyle car-driver and his equally inevitable defeat, had raised her spirits so much that she accepted Francie’s expurgated account of her sojourn at Bruff with almost boisterous approval. She even extended a jovial feeler in the direction of Christopher.
“Well, now, after all the chances you’ve had, Francie, I’ll not give tuppence for you if you haven’t Mr. Dysart at your feet!”
It was not usually Francie’s way to object to jests of this kind, but now she shrank from Charlotte’s heavy hand.
“Oh, he was awfully kind,” she said hurriedly; “but I don’t think he’ll ever want to marry anyone, not even Miss Hope-Drummond, for all as hard as she’s trying!”
“Paugh! Let her try! She’ll not get him, not if she was to put her eyes on sticks! But believe you me, child, there never was a man yet that pretended he didn’t want to marry that wasn’t dying for a wife!”
This statement demanded no reply, and Miss Mullen departed to the kitchen to see the new kittens and to hold high inquisition into the doings of the servants during her absence.
Mrs. Beattie gave but two parties in the year—one at Christmas, on account of the mistletoe; and one in July, on account of the raspberries, for which her garden was justly famous. This, it need scarcely be said, was the raspberry party, and accordingly when the afternoon had brought a cessation of the drizzling rain, Miss Ada and Miss Flossie Beattie might have been seen standing among the wet over-arching raspberry canes, devoured by midges, scarlet from the steamy heat, and pestered by that most maddening of all created things, the common fly, but, nevertheless, filling basket after basket with fruit. Miss May and Miss Carrie spent a long and arduous day in the kitchen making tartlets, brewing syrupy lemonade, and decorating cakes with pink and white sugar devices and mottoes archly stimulative of conversation. Upon Mrs. Beattie and her two remaining daughters devolved the task of arranging the drawing-room chairs in a Christy minstrel circle, and borrowing extra tea-cups from their obliging neighbour, Mrs. Lynch; while Mr. Beattie absented himself judiciously until his normal five o’clock dinner hour, when he returned to snatch a perfunctory meal at a side table in the hall, his womenkind, after their wont, declining anything more substantial than nomadic cups of tea, brewed in the kitchen tea-pot, and drunk standing, like the Queen’s health.
But by eight o’clock