“What were you and the old woman talking about all that time? I thought you were never coming.”
“Business,” said Lambert shortly; then viciously, “if any conversation with a woman can ever be called business.”
“Oho! then you couldn’t get her to do what you wanted!” laughed Francie; “very good for you too! I think you always get your own way.”
“Is that your opinion?” said Lambert, turning his dark eyes upon her; “I’m sorry I can’t agree with you.”
The fierce heat had gone out of the afternoon as they passed along the lonely road, through the country of rocks and hazel bushes; the sun was sending low flashes into their eyes from the bright mirror of the lake; the goats that hopped uncomfortably about in the enforced and detested tête-à-tête caused by a wooden yoke across their necks, cast blue shadows of many-legged absurdity on the warm slabs of stone; a carrion crow, swaying on the thin topmost bough of a thorn-bush, a blot in the mellow afternoon sky, was looking about him if haply he could see a wandering kid whose eyes would serve him for his supper; and a couple of miles away, at Rosemount, Mrs. Lambert was sending down to be kept hot what she and Charlotte had left of the Sally Lunn.
Francie was not sorry when she found herself again under the trees of the Lismoyle highroad, and in spite of the injuries which the pommels of the saddle were inflicting upon her, and the growing stiffness of all her muscles, she held gallantly on at a sharp trot, till her hair-pins and her hat were loosed from their foundations, and her green habit rose in ungainly folds. They were nearing Rosemount when they heard wheels behind them. Lambert took the left side of the road, and the black mare followed his example with such suddenness, that Francie, when she had recovered her equilibrium, could only be thankful that nothing more than her hat had come off. With the first instinct of woman she snatched at the coils of hair that fell down her back and hung enragingly over her eyes, and tried to wind them on to her head again. She became horribly aware that a waggonette with several people in it had pulled up beside her, and, finally, that a young man with a clean-shaved face and an eyeglass was handing her her hat and taking off his own.
Holding in her teeth the few hair-pins that she had been able to save from the wreck, she stammered a gratitude that she was far from feeling; and when she heard Lambert say, “Oh, thank you, Dysart, you just saved me getting off,” she felt that her discomfiture was complete.
CHAPTER VIII.
Christopher Dysart was a person about whom Lismoyle and its neighbourhood had not been able to come to a satisfactory conclusion, unless, indeed, that conclusion can be called satisfactory which admitted him to be a disappointment. From the time that, as a shy, plain little boy he first went to school, and, after the habit of boys, ceased to exist except in theory and holidays, a steady undercurrent of interest had always set about him. His mother was so charming, and his father so delicate, and he himself so conveniently contemporary with so many daughters, that although the occasional glimpses vouchsafed of him during his Winchester and Oxford career were as discouraging as they were brief, it was confidently expected that he would emerge from his boyish shyness when he came to take his proper place in the county and settle down at Bruff. Thus Lady Eyrefield, and Mrs. Waller, and their like, the careful mothers of those contemporaneous daughters, and thus also, after their kind, the lesser ladies of Lismoyle.
But though Christopher was now seven and twenty he seemed as far from “taking his place in the county” as he had ever been. His mother’s friends had no particular fault to find with him; that was a prominent feature in their dissatisfaction. He was quite good-looking enough for an eldest son, and his politeness to their daughters left them nothing to complain of except the discouraging fact that it was exceeded by his politeness to themselves. His readiness to talk when occasion demanded was undisputed, but his real or pretended dulness in those matters of local interest, which no one except an outsider calls gossip, made conversation with him a hollow and heartless affair. One of his most exasperating points was that he could not be referred to any known type. He was “between the sizes,” as shopmen say of gloves. He was not smart and aggressive enough for the soldiering type, nor sporting enough for the country gentleman, but neither had he the docility and attentiveness of the ideal curate; he could not even be lightly disposed of as an eccentricity, which would have been some sort of consolation.