“What makes you say they didn’t want anything to eat?” she asked; “was Miss Francie ill, or was anything the matter with her?”
“How do I know what ailed her?” replied Norry, pounding a pillow-case with her fist before putting it away; “I have somethin’ to do besides followin’ her or mindin’ her.”
“Ye’d betther ax thim that knows. ’Twas Louisa seen her within in the dhrawn’-room, an’ whatever was on her she was cryin’; but, sure, Louisa tells lies as fast as a pig’d gallop.”
“What did she say?” Charlotte darted the question at Norry as a dog snaps at a piece of meat.
“Then she said plinty, an’ ’tis she that’s able. If ye told that one a thing and locked the doore on her the way she couldn’t tell it agin, she’d bawl it up the chimbley.”
“Where’s Louisa?” interrupted Charlotte impatiently.
“Meself can tell ye as good as Louisa,” said Norry instantly taking offence; “she landed into the dhrawn’-room with the tay, and there was Miss Francie sittin’ on the sofa and her handkerchief in her eyes, and Misther Dysart beyond in the windy and not a word nor a stir out of him, only with his eyes shtuck out in the garden, an’ she cryin’ always.”
“Psha! Louisa’s a fool! How does she know Miss Francie was crying? I’ll bet a shilling ’twas only blowing her nose she was.”
Norry had by this time spread a ragged blanket on the table, and, snatching up the tongs, she picked out of the heart of the fire a red-hot heater and thrust it into a box-iron with unnecessary violence.
“An’ why wouldn’t she cry? Wasn’t I listenin’ to her cryin’ in her room lasht night an’ I goin’ up to bed?” She banged the iron down on the table and began to rub it to and fro on the blanket. “But what use is it to cry, even if ye dhragged the hair out of yer head? Ye might as well be singin’ and dancin’.”
She flung up her head, and stared across the kitchen under the wisps of hair that hung over her unseeing eyes with such an expression as Deborah the Prophetess might have worn. Charlotte gave a grunt of contempt, and picking Susan up from the bar of the table, she put him on her shoulder and walked out of the kitchen.
Francie had been since breakfast sitting by the window of the dining-room, engaged in the cheerless task of darning a stocking on a soda-water bottle. Mending stockings was not an art that she excelled in; she could trim a hat or cut out a dress, but the dark, unremunerative toil of mending stockings was as distasteful to her as stone-breaking to a tramp, and the simile might easily be carried out by comparing the results of the process to macadamising. It was a still, foggy morning; the boughs of the scarlet-blossomed fuchsia were greyed with moisture, and shining drops studded the sash of the open window like sea-anemones. It was a day that was both close and chilly, and intolerable as the atmosphere of the Tally Ho dining-room would have been with the window shut, the breakfast things still on the table, and the all-pervading aroma of cats, the damp, lifeless air seemed only a shade better to Francie as she raised her tired eyes from time to time and looked out upon the discouraging prospect. Everything stood in the same trance of stillness in which it had been when she had got up at five o’clock and looked out at the sluggish dawn broadening in blank silence upon the fields. She had leaned out of her window till she had become cold through and through, and after that had unlocked her trunk, taken out Hawkins’ letters, and going back to bed had read and re-read them there. The old glamour was about them; the convincing sincerity and assurance that was as certain of her devotion as of his own, and the unfettered lavishness of expression that made her turn hot and cold as she read them. She had time to go through many phases of feeling before the chapel-bell began to ring for eight o’clock Mass, and she stole down to the kitchen to see if the post had come in. The letters were lying on the table; three or four for Charlotte, the local paper, a circular about peat litter addressed to the Stud-groom, Tally Ho, and, underneath all, the thick, rough envelope with the ugly boyish writing that had hardly changed since Mr. Hawkins had written his first letters home from Cheltenham College. Francie caught it up, and was back in her own room in the twinkling of an eye. It contained only a few words.