Francie with some difficulty brought the black mare beside the chestnut, and put her hand for an instant on Lambert’s arm.
“Ah now, don’t be angry with me!” she said with a glance whose efficacy she had often proved in similar cases; “you know I was only funning.”
“I am not in the least angry with you,” replied Lambert coldly, though his eyes turned in spite of himself to her face.
“Oh, I know very well you’re angry with me,” rejoined Francie, with unfeigned enjoyment of the situation; “your mustash always gets as black as a coal when you’re angry.”
The adornment referred to twitched, but its owner said nothing.
“There now, you’re laughing!” continued Francie, “but it’s quite true; I remember the first time I noticed that, was the time you brought Mrs. Lambert up to town about her teeth, and you took places at the Gaiety for the three of us—and oh! do you remember—” leaning back and laughing whole-heartedly, “she couldn’t get her teeth in in time, and you wanted her to go without any, and she wouldn’t, for fear she might laugh at the pantomime, and I had promised to go to the Dalkey Band that night with the Whittles, and then when you got up to our house and found you’d got the three tickets for nothing, you were so mad that when I came down into the parlour I declare I thought you’d been dyeing your mustash! Aunt Tish said afterwards it was because your face got so white, but I knew it was because you were in such a passion.”
“Well, I didn’t like chucking away fifteen shillings a bit more than anyone else would,” said Lambert.
“Ah, well, we made it up, d’ye remember?” said Francie, regarding him with a laughing eye, in which there was a suspicion of sentiment; “and after all, you were able to change the tickets to another night, and it was ‘Pinafore,’ and you laughed at me so awfully, because I cried at the part where the two lovers are saying good-bye to each other, and poor Mrs. Lambert got her teeth in in a hurry to go with us, and she couldn’t utter the whole night for fear they’d fall out.”
Perhaps the allusions to his wife’s false teeth had a subtly soothing effect on Mr. Lambert. He never was averse to anything that showed that other people were as conscious as he was of the disparity between his own admirable personal equipment and that of Mrs. Lambert; it was another admission of the great fact that he had thrown himself away. His eyebrows and moustache became less truculent, he let himself down with a complacent sarcasm on Francie’s method of holding her whip, and, as they rode on, he permitted to himself the semi-proprietary enjoyment of an agent in pointing out boundaries, and landmarks, and improvements.
They had ridden at first under a pale green arch of roadside trees, with fields on either side full of buttercups and dog-daisies, a land of pasture and sleek cattle, and neat stone walls. But in the second or third mile the face of the country changed. The blue lake that had lain in the distance like a long slab of lapis lazuli, was within two fields of them now, moving drowsily in and out of the rocks, and over the coarse gravel of its shore. The trees had dwindled to ragged hazel and thorn bushes; the fat cows of the comfortable farms round Lismoyle were replaced by lean, dishevelled goats, and shelves and flags of grey limestone began to contest the right of the soil with the thin grass and the wiry brushwood. We have said grey limestone, but that hard-worked adjective cannot at all express the cold, pure blueness that these boulders take, under the sky of summer. Some word must yet be coined in which neither blue nor lilac shall have the supremacy, and in which the steely purple of a pigeon’s breast shall not be forgotten.