Mr. Hawkins looked more cheerful, and observing that as he also owed a visit at Bruff this would be a good day to pay it, was turning back to the barracks for his trap, when Miss Mullen intervened with almost childlike impulsiveness.
“I declare now, it vexes my righteous soul to think of your getting out a horse and trap, with two seats going a-begging here. It’s not my carriage, Mr. Hawkins, or I promise you you should have one of them.”
Hawkins looked gratefully at her, and then uncertainly at Francie.
“He’s welcome to come if he likes,” said Francie frigidly, thinking with a mixture of alarm and satisfaction of what Roddy would say if he heard of it.
Hawkins waited for no further invitation, and got into the waggonette. A trait of character as old as humanity was at this time asserting itself, with singular freshness and force, in the bosom of Mr. Gerald Hawkins. He had lightly taken Francie’s heart in his hand, and as lightly thrown it away, without plot or premeditation; but now that another man had picked it up and kept it for his own, he began to see it as a thing of surpassing value. He could have borne with a not uninteresting regret the idea of Francie languishing somewhere in the suburbs of Dublin, and would even, had the chance come in his way, have flirted with her in a kind and consolatory manner. But to see her here, prosperous, prettier than ever, and possessing the supreme attraction of having found favour in someone else’s eyes, was a very different affair. The old glamour took him again, but with tenfold force, and, while he sat in the waggonette and talked to his ancient foe, Miss Mullen, with a novel friendliness, he gnawed the ends of his moustache in the bitterness of his soul because of the coldness of the eyes that were fascinating him.
It was a bright and blowy afternoon, with dazzling masses of white cloud moving fast across the blue, and there was a shifting glimmer of young leaves in the Bruff avenue, and a gusty warmth of fragrance from lilacs and laurel blossoms on either side. As this strangely compounded party of visitors drove up to the hall door they caught sight of Christopher going down the lawn towards the boat-house, and in answer to a call from Mr. Hawkins, he turned and came back to meet them. He was only on his way to the boat-house to meet Cursiter, he explained, and he was the only person at home, but he hoped that they would, none the less, come in and see him. Hawkins helped Francie out of the carriage, giving her a hand no less formal than that which she gave him. She recognised the formality, and was not displeased to think that it was assumed in obedience to her wish.
They all strolled slowly on towards the boat-house, Hawkins walking behind with Miss Mullen, Francie in front with her host. It was not her first meeting with him since her return to Lismoyle, and she found it quite easy to talk with him of her travels, and of those small things that make up the sum of ordinary afternoon conversation. She had come to believe now that she must have been mistaken on that afternoon when he had stood over her in the Tally Ho drawing-room and said those unexpected things to her—things that, at the time, seemed neither ambiguous nor Platonic. He was now telling her, in the quietly hesitating voice that had always seemed to her the very height of good breeding, that the weather was perfect, and that the lake was lower than he had ever known it at that time of year, with other like commonplaces, and though there was something wanting in his manner that she had been accustomed to, she discerned none of the awkwardness that her experience had made her find inseparable from the rejected state.
There was no sign of Captain Cursiter or his launch when they reached the pier, and, after a fruitless five minutes of waiting, they went on, at Christopher’s suggestion, to see the bluebells in the wood that girdled the little bay of Bruff. Before they reached the gate of the wood, Miss Mullen had attached herself to Christopher, having remarked, with engaging frankness, that Mr. Hawkins could only talk to her about Lismoyle, and she wanted Sir Christopher to tell her of the doings of the great world; and Francie found herself following them with Hawkins by her side. The walk turned inwards and upwards from the lake, climbing, by means of a narrow flight of moss-grown stone steps, till it gained the height of about fifty feet above the water. Walking there, the glitter of the lake came up brokenly to the eye, through the beech-tree branches, that lay like sprays of maidenhair beneath them; and over the hill and down to the water’s edge and far away among the grey beech stems, the bluebells ran like a blue mist through all the wood. Their perfume rose like incense about Francie and her companion as they walked slowly, and ever more slowly, along the path. The spirit of the wood stole into their veins, and a pleasure that they could not have explained held them in silence that they were afraid to break.
Hawkins was the first to make a diffident comment.
“They’re ripping, aren’t they? They’re a great deal better than they were last year.”