“Well, never mind, me child,” she said with noisy cheerfulness; “you’re not trusting to the likes of that fellow! wait till ye’re me Lady Dysart of Bruff, and it’s little ye’ll think of him then!”
They had reached the Tally Ho gate by this time; Francie opened it, and plunged into the pitch-dark tunnel of evergreens without a word.
CHAPTER XXVII.
The pre-eminently domestic smell of black currant jam pervaded Tally Ho next day. The morning had been spent by Charlotte and her retainers in stripping the straggling old bushes of the berries that resembled nothing so much as boot-buttons in size, colour and general consistency; the preserving pan had been borrowed, according to immemorial custom, from Miss Egan of the hotel, and at three o’clock of the afternoon the first relay was sluggishly seething and bubbling on the kitchen fire, and Charlotte, Norry, and Bid Sal were seated at the kitchen table snipping the brown tips of the shining fruit that still awaited its fate.
It was a bright, steamy day, when the hot sun and the wet earth turned the atmosphere into a Turkish bath, and the cats sat out of doors, but avoided the grass like the plague. Francie had docilely picked currants with the others. She was accustomed to making herself useful, and it did not occur to her to shut herself up in her room, or go for a walk, or, in fact, isolate herself with her troubles in any way. She had too little self-consciousness for these deliberate methods, and she moved among the currant bushes in her blue gown, and was merely uncomplainingly thankful that she was able to pull the broad leaf of her hat down so as to hide the eyes that were heavy from a sleepless night and red from the sting of tears. She went over again what Lambert had told her, as she mechanically dropped the currants into her tin can; the soldier-servant had read the letters, and had told Michael, the Rosemount groom, and Michael had told Mr. Lambert. She wouldn’t have cared a pin about his being engaged if he had only told her so at first. She had flirted with engaged men plenty of times, and it hadn’t done anybody any harm, but this was quite different. She couldn’t believe, after the way he went on, that he cared about another girl all the time, and yet Michael had said that the soldier had said that they were to be married at Christmas. Well, thank goodness, she thought, with a half sob, she knew about it now; he’d find it hard to make a fool of her again.
After the early dinner the practical part of the jam-making began, and for an hour Francie snipped at the currant-tops as industriously as Charlotte herself. But by the time that the first brew was ready for the preserving pan, the heat of the kitchen, and the wearisomeness of Charlotte’s endless discussions with Norry, made intolerable the headache that had all day hovered about her forehead, and she fetched her hat and a book and went out into the garden to look for coolness and distraction. She wandered up to the seat where she had sat on the day that Lambert gave her the bangle, and, sitting down, opened her book, a railway novel, bought by Charlotte on her journey from Dublin. She read its stodgily sensational pages with hot tired eyes, and tried hard to forget her own unhappiness in the infinitely more terrific woes of its heroine; but now and then some chance expression, or one of those terms of endearment that were lavished throughout its pages, would leap up into borrowed life and sincerity, and she would shut her eyes and drift back into the golden haze on Lough Moyle, when his hand had pressed her head down on his shoulder, and his kisses had touched her soul. At such moments all the heated stillness of the lake was round her, with no creature nearer than the white cottages on the far hillsides; and when the inevitable present swam back to her, with carts rattling past on the road, and insects buzzing and blundering against her face, and Bid Sal’s shrill summoning of the hens to their food, she would fling herself again into the book to hide from the pursuing pain and the undying, insane voice of hope.
Hope mastered pain, and reality mastered both, when, with the conventionality of situation to which life sometimes condescends, there came steps on the gravel, and looking up she saw that Hawkins was coming towards her. Her heart stopped and rushed on again like a startled horse, but all the rest of her remained still and almost impassive, and she leaned her head over her book to keep up the affectation of not having seen him.
“I saw your dress through the trees as I was coming up the drive,” he said after a moment of suffocating silence, “and so—” he held out his hand, “aren’t you going to shake hands with me?”
“How d’ye do, Mr. Hawkins?” she gave him a limp hand and withdrew it instantly.
Hawkins sat down beside her, and looked hard at her half-averted face. He had solved the problem of her treatment of him last night in a way quite satisfactory to himself, and he thought that now that he had been sharp enough to have found her here, away from Miss Mullen’s eye, things would be very different. He had quite forgiven her her share in the transgression; in fact, if the truth were known he had enjoyed himself considerably after she had left Mrs. Beattie’s party, and had gone back to Captain Cursiter and disingenuously given him to understand that he had hardly spoken a word to Miss Fitzpatrick the whole evening.