The Real Charlotte - Ross Martin

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further amenities the party passed out of sight. This was not Miss Hope-Drummond’s first meeting with her host. His bath-chair had daily, as it seemed to her, lain in wait in the shrubberies, to cause terror to the solitary, and discomfiture to tête-à-têtes; and on one morning he had stealthily protruded the crook of his stick from the door of his room as she went by, and all but hooked her round the ankle with it.

      “Really, it is disgraceful that he is not locked up,” she said to herself crossly, as she gathered the contested bud, and sat down to write letters; “but in Ireland no one seems to think anything of anything!”

      It was very hot down in the garden where Lady Dysart and Pamela were at work; Lady Dysart kneeling in the inadequate shade of a parasol, whose handle she had propped among the pans in the wheelbarrow, and Pamela weeding a flower-bed a few yards away. It was altogether a scene worthy in its domestic simplicity of the Fairchild Family, only that instead of Mr. Fairchild, “stretched on the grass at a little distance with his book,” a bronze-coloured dachshund lay roasting his long side in the sun; and also that Lady Dysart, having mistaken the young chickweed in a seedling pan for the asters that should have been there, was filling her bed symmetrically with the former, an imbecility that Mrs. Sherwood would never have permitted in a parent. The mother and daughter lifted their heads at the sound of the conflict on the terrace.

      “Papa will frighten Evelyn into a fit,” observed Pamela, rubbing a midge off her nose with an earthy gardening glove; “I wish James Canavan could be induced to keep him away from the house.”

      “It’s all right, dear,” said Lady Dysart, panting a little as she straightened her back and surveyed her rows of chickweed; “Christopher is with her, and you know he never notices anyone else when Christopher is there.”

      Lady Dysart had in her youth married, with a little judicious coercion, a man thirty years older than herself, and after a long and, on the whole, extremely unpleasant period of matrimony, she was now enjoying a species of Indian summer, dating from six years back, when Christopher’s coming of age and the tenants’ rejoicings thereat, had caused such a paroxysm of apoplectic jealousy on the part of Christopher’s father as, combining with the heat of the day, had brought on a “stroke.” Since then the bath-chair and James Canavan had mercifully intervened between him and the rest of the world, and his offspring were now able to fly before him with a frankness and success impossible in the old days.

      Pamela did not answer her mother at once.

      “Do you know I’m afraid Christopher isn’t with her,” she said, looking both guilty and perturbed.

      Lady Dysart groaned aloud.

      “Why, where is he?” she demanded. “I left Evelyn helping him to paste in photographs after breakfast; I thought that would have been nice occupation for them for at least two hours; but as for Christopher—” she continued, her voice deepening to declamation, “it is quite hopeless to expect anything from him. I should rather trust Garry to entertain anyone. The day he took her out in the boat they weren’t in till six o’clock!”

      “That was because Garry ran the punt on the shallow, and they had to wade ashore and walk all the way round.”

      “That has nothing to say to it; at all events they had something to talk about when they came back, which is more than Christopher has when he has been out sailing. It is most disheartening; I ask nice girls to the house, but I might just as well ask nice boys—Oh, of course, yes—” in answer to a protest from her daughter; “he talks to them; but you know quite well what I mean.”

      This complaint was not the first indication of Lady Dysart’s sentiments about this curious son whom she had produced. She was a clever woman, a renowned solver of the acrostics in her society paper, and a holder of strong opinions as to the prophetic meaning of the Pyramids; but Christopher was an acrostic in a strange language, an enigma beyond her sphere. She had a vague but rooted feeling that young men were normally in love with somebody, or at least pretending to be so; it was, of course, an excellent thing that Christopher did not lose his heart to the wrong people, but she would probably have preferred the agitation of watching his progress through the most alarming flirtations to the security that deprived conversation with other mothers of much of its legitimate charm.

      “Well, there was Miss Fetherstone,” began Pamela after a moment of obvious consideration.

      “Miss Fetherstone!” echoed Lady Dysart in her richest contralto, fixing eyes of solemn reproach upon her daughter, “do you suppose that for one instant I thought there was anything in that? No baby, no idiot baby, could have believed in it!”

      “Well, I don’t know,” said Pamela; “I think you and Mrs. Waller believed in it, at least I remember you both settling what your wedding presents were to be!”

      “I never said a word about wedding presents, it was Mrs. Waller! Of course she was anxious about her own niece, just as anybody would have been under the circumstances.” Lady Dysart here became aware of something in Pamela’s expression that made her add hurriedly, “Not that I ever had the faintest shadow of belief in it. Too well do I know Christopher’s platonic philanderings; and you see the affair turned out just as I said it would.”

      Pamela refrained from pursuing her advantage.

      “If you like I’ll make him come with Evelyn and me to the choir practice this afternoon,” she said after a pause. “Of course he’ll hate it, poor boy, especially as Miss Mullen wrote to me the other day and asked us to come to tea after it was over.”

      “Oh, yes!” said Lady Dysart with sudden interest and forgetfulness of her recent contention, “and you will see the new importation whom we met with Mr. Lambert the other day. What a charming young creature she looked! ‘The fair one with the golden locks’ was the only description for her! And yet that miserable Christopher will only say that she is ‘chocolate-boxey!’ Oh! I have no patience with Christopher’s affectation!” she ended, rising from her knees and brushing the earth from her extensive lap with a gesture of annoyance. She began to realise that the sun was hot and luncheon late, and it was at this unpropitious moment that Pamela, having finished the flower-bed she had been weeding, approached the scene of her mother’s labours.

      “Mamma,” she said faintly, “you have planted the whole bed with chickweed!”

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      It had been hard work pulling the punt across from Bruff to Lismoyle with two well-grown young women sitting in the stern; it had been a hot walk up from the landing-place to the church, but worse than these, transcendently worse, in that it involved the suffering of the mind as well as the body, was the choir practice. Christopher’s long nose drooped despondingly over his Irish church hymnal, and his long back had a disconsolate hoop in it as he leaned it against the wall in his place in the backmost row of the choir benches. The chants had been long and wearisome, and the hymns were proving themselves equally enduring. Christopher was not eminently musical or conspicuously religious, and he regarded with a kind of dismal respect and surprise the fervour in Pamela’s pure profile as she turned to Mrs. Gascogne and suggested that the hymn they had just gone through twice should be sung over again. He supposed it was because she had High Church tendencies that she was able to stand this sort of thing, and his mind drifted into abstract speculations as to how people could be as good as Pamela was and live.

      In the interval before the last hymn he derived a temporary solace from finding his own name inscribed in dull red characters in the leaf of his hymn-book, with, underneath in the same colour, the fateful inscription, “Written in blood by Garrett Dysart.” The thought of his younger brother utilising pleasantly a cut finger and the long minutes of the archdeacon’s sermon, had for the moment inspired Christopher with a sympathetic amusement, but he had relapsed into his pristine gloom. He knew the hymn perfectly well by this time, and his inoffensive tenor joined mechanically with

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