We said we had never known of such. That it had developed itself out of the story; in fact, that we had no idea that anything of the kind was possible.
“Well, ’tis pairfectly true!” replied the old lady, intensely.
And so indeed it was, as was then expounded to us. In almost every detail of Charlotte’s relations with Lambert and his wife; incredibly, even appallingly true. And we then remembered how, while we were still writing the book, a communication had come to my sister, purporting to be from the Real Charlotte, in some sphere other than this. A message of such hatred as inevitably suggested the words, “Hell holds no fury like a woman scorned.”
These are things beyond and above our comprehension; it is trying the poor old scapegoat of Coincidence very high if it is to be pressed into the service of a case as complicated, and elaborate, and identical in detail as was this one.
“The Real Charlotte” went with us through the years ’90 and ’91, and was finished during the early summer of ’92. There is an entry in my diary. “June 8, 1892. Wrote feverishly. The most agitating scenes of Charlotte. Finished Francie.”
We felt her death very much. We had sat out on the cliffs, in heavenly May weather, with Poul Ghurrum, the Blue Hole, at our feet, and the great wall of Drishane Side rising sheer behind us, blazing with yellow furze blossom, just flecked here and there with the reticent silver of blackthorn. The time of the “Scoriveen,” the Blackthorn winter, that last flick of the lash of the east wind, that comes so often early in May, was past. We and the dogs had achieved as much freedom from social and household offices as gave us the mornings, pure and wide, and unmolested. There is a place in the orchard at Drishane that is bound up with those final chapters, when we began to know that there could be but one fate for Francie. It felt like killing a wild bird that had trusted itself to you.
We have often been reviled for that, as for many other incidents in “The Real Charlotte,” but I still think we were right.
Although the book was practically finished in June, the delays and interruptions that had followed it from the first pursued it still. It was still in the roughest and most bewildering of manuscript, and its recopying involved us, as has been invariably our fate, in many alterations and additions. Interspersed with this work were short stories, visits, hunting, occasional articles called for by some casual paper or magazine. It was not until February 4, 1893, that we “actually and entirely finished off the Welsh Aunt, alias ‘The Real Charlotte,’ and sent her off. Poor old thing.”
But even then there was no rest for the sole of her foot. Bentley offered £100, neither more nor less. Our diaries remark, “wrote breathing forth fire and fury, and refused.” In March I find that the day after I had “ridden a hunt on a drunk pony,” “Bentley returned the MS.” I think the excitement of the hunt on that unusual mount took the sting out of Charlotte’s reverse. In April, “Smith and Elder curtly refused the Real C. They said their reader, Mr. James Payn, was ill. Can his illness have been the result of reading Charlotte? Or was it anticipatory?” Martin was at this time in Dublin, a sojourn thus summarised in her diary: “Dublin filled with dull, dirty, middle-aged women. Had my hair done in enormous bundle at back. Hideous but compulsory.” I joined her there and we proceeded to London and saw and heard many cheerful things. (Amongst other items in my diary, I find “Heard Mr. Haweis preach a good sermon on Judas Iscariot, with faint but pleasant suggestion of a parallel between him and Mr. Gladstone.”) We then opened negotiations with Messrs. Ward and Downey, and pending their completion, Martin and I, with my mother and my sister, paid our first visit to Oxford.
The affair opened badly. Our luggage had been early entrusted to a porter, to be deposited in the cloak-room, and the porter was trysted to meet us at a certain hour and place. At the time appointed the porter was not. Our luggage eyed us coldly across the barrier, and, the recognition being one-sided, and unsupported by tickets, remained there, while we searched for the porter and the tickets (for which he had paid). He never transpired, and his fate remains a Mystery of the Great Western. By what is known in an Irish Petty Sessions Court as “hard swearing,” we obtained possession of our property, but not before my mother had (vide my diary) “gone foaming to Oxford” without either her ducats or her daughters, coerced by the necessity of propitiating our host, a Don of Magdalen, with whom it seemed unwise to trifle.