“You’re different to me,” said Francie in a low voice, “and you know it well.”
The tears came to her eyes, and Christopher, who could not know that this generality covered an aching thought of Hawkins, was smitten with horrified self-questioning as to whether anything he had said or done could have wounded this girl, who was so much more observant and sensitive than he could have believed.
“I can’t let you say things like that,” he said clumsily. “If we are different from you, it is so much the worse for us.”
“You’re trying to pay me a compliment now to get out of it,” said Francie, recovering herself; “isn’t that just like a man?”
She felt, however, that she had given him pain, and the knowledge seemed to bring him more within her comprehension.
CHAPTER XXII.
There are few things that so stimulate life, both social and vegetable, in a country neighbourhood, as the rivalry that exists, sometimes unconfessed, sometimes bursting into an open flame, among the garden owners of the district. The Bruff garden was a little exalted and removed from such competition, but the superiority had its depressing aspect for Lady Dysart in that it was counted no credit to her to excel her neighbours, although those neighbours took to themselves the highest credit when they succeeded in excelling her. Of all these Mr. Lambert was the one she most feared and respected. He knew as well, if not better than she, the joints in the harness of Doolan the gardener, the weak battalions in his army of bedding-out plants, the failures in the ranks of his roses. Doolan himself, the despotic and self-confident, felt an inward qualm when he saw Mr. Lambert strolling slowly through the garden with her ladyship, as he was doing this very afternoon, his observant eye taking in everything that Doolan would have preferred that it should not take in, while he paid a fitting attention to Lady Dysart’s conversation.
“I cannot understand why these Victor Verdiers have not better hearts,” she was saying, with the dejection of a clergyman disappointed in his flock. “Mrs. Waller told me they were very greedy feeders, and so I gave them the cleanings of the scullery drain, but they don’t seem to care for it. Doolan, of course, said Mrs. Waller was wrong, but I should like to know what you thought about it.”
Mr. Lambert delivered a diplomatic opinion, which sufficiently coincided with Lady Dysart’s views, and yet kept her from feeling that she had been entirely in the right. He prided himself as much on his knowledge of women as of roses, and there were ultra feminine qualities in Lady Dysart, which made her act up to his calculations on almost every point. Pamela did not lend herself equally well to his theories; “she hasn’t half the go of her mother. She’d as soon talk to an old woman as to the smartest chap in Ireland,” was how he expressed the fine impalpable barrier that he always felt between himself and Miss Dysart. She was now exactly fulfilling this opinion by devoting herself to the entertainment of his wife, while the others were amusing themselves down at the launch; and being one of those few who can go through unpleasant social duties with “all grace, and not with half disdain hid under grace,” not even Lambert could guess that she desired anything more agreeable.
“Isn’t it disastrous that young Hynes is determined upon going to America?” remarked Lady Dysart presently, as they left the garden; “just when he had learned Doolan’s ways, and Doolan is so hard to please.”