With Lady Dysart intention was accomplishment as nearly as might be. She had scarcely finished speaking before she began a headlong advance upon the objects of her diatribe, making a short cut across the corner of a lawn-tennis court, and scarcely observing the havoc that her transit wrought in the game. Charlotte was less rash. She steered her course clear of the tennis grounds, and of the bench of matrons, passed the six Miss Beatties with a comprehensive “How are ye, girls?” and took up her position under one of the tall elm trees.
Under the next tree a few men were assembled, herding together for mutual protection after the manner of men, and laying down the law to each other about road sessions, the grand jury, and Irish politics generally. They were a fairly representative trio; a country gentleman with a grey moustache and a loud voice in which he was announcing that nothing would give him greater pleasure than to pull the rope at the execution of a certain English statesman; a slight, dejected-looking clergyman, who vied with Major Waller in his denunciations, but chastenedly, like an echo in a cathedral aisle; and a smartly dressed man of about thirty-five, of whom a more detailed description need not be given, as he has been met with in the first chapter, and the six years after nine-and-twenty do little more than mellow a man’s taste in checks, and sprinkle a grey hair or two on his temples.
Miss Mullen listened for a few minutes to the melancholy pessimisms of the archdeacon, and then, interrupting Major Waller in a fine outburst on the advisability of martial law, she thrust herself and her attendant cloud of midges into the charmed circle of the smoke of Mr. Lambert’s cigarette.
“Ho! do I hear me old friend the Major at politics?” she said, shaking hands effusively with the three men. “I declare I’m a better politician than any one of you! D’ye know how I served Tom Casey, the land-leaguing plumber, yesterday? I had him mending my tank, and when I got him into it I whipped the ladder away, and told him not a step should he budge till he sang ‘God save the Queen!’ I was arguing there half an hour with him in water up to his middle before I converted him, and then it wasn’t so much the warmth of his convictions as the cold of his legs made him tune up. I call that practical politics!”
The speed and vigour with which this story was told would have astounded anyone who did not know Miss Mullen’s powers of narration, but Mr. Lambert, to whom it seemed specially addressed, merely took his cigarette out of his mouth, and said, with a familiar laugh:
“Practical politics, by Jove! I call it a cold water cure. Kill or cure like the rest of your doctoring, eh! Charlotte?”
Miss Mullen joined with entire good-humour in the laugh that followed.
“Oh, th’ ingratitude of man!” she exclaimed. “Archdeacon, you’ve seen his bald scalp from the pulpit, and I ask you, now, isn’t that a fresh crop he has on it? I leave it to his conscience, if he has one, to say if it wasn’t my doctoring gave him that fine black thatch he has now!”
The archdeacon fixed his eyes seriously upon her; Charlotte’s playfulness always alarmed and confused him.
“Do not appeal to me, Miss Mullen,” he answered, in his refined, desponding voice; “my unfortunate sight makes my evidence in such a matter worth nothing; and, by the way, I meant to ask you if your niece would be good enough to help us in the choir? I understand she sings.”