Test Bank for Starting Out with Python (4th

Edition) 4th Edition download

http://testbankbell.com/product/test-bank-for-starting-out-with-
python-4th-edition-4th-edition/

Download more testbank from https://testbankbell.com

We believe these products will be a great fit for you. Click
the link to download now, or visit testbankbell.com
to discover even more!

Starting Out with Python 4th Edition Gaddis Test Bank

https://testbankbell.com/product/starting-out-with-python-4th-
edition-gaddis-test-bank/

Test Bank for Starting Out with Python (4th Edition)

4th Edition

https://testbankbell.com/product/test-bank-for-starting-out-with-
python-4th-edition-4th-edition/

Test Bank for Starting out with Python, 5th Edition,

Tony Gaddis

https://testbankbell.com/product/test-bank-for-starting-out-with-
python-5th-edition-tony-gaddis/

Solution Manual for Starting out with Python, 5th

Edition, Tony Gaddis

https://testbankbell.com/product/solution-manual-for-starting-
out-with-python-5th-edition-tony-gaddis/
Starting Out with Programming Logic and Design 4th
Edition Tony Gaddis Test Bank

https://testbankbell.com/product/starting-out-with-programming-
logic-and-design-4th-edition-tony-gaddis-test-bank/

Starting Out with C++ Early Objects 9th Edition Gaddis

Test Bank

https://testbankbell.com/product/starting-out-with-c-early-
objects-9th-edition-gaddis-test-bank/

Test Bank for Starting out with Visual C#, 5th Edition,
Tony Gaddis

https://testbankbell.com/product/test-bank-for-starting-out-with-
visual-c-5th-edition-tony-gaddis/

Test Bank for Starting Out with Alice, 3/E 3rd Edition
: 0133129748

https://testbankbell.com/product/test-bank-for-starting-out-with-
alice-3-e-3rd-edition-0133129748/

Test Bank Starting Out with Java: Early Objects, 5/E

Tony Gaddis

https://testbankbell.com/product/test-bank-starting-out-with-
java-early-objects-5-e-tony-gaddis/
Starting Out with Python 4e (Gaddis)
Chapter 1 Introduction to Computers and Programming

Test Bank for Starting Out with Python (4th Edi-

tion) 4th Edition
full chapter at: https://testbankbell.com/product/test-bank-for-
starting-out-with-python-4th-edition-4th-edition/
TRUE/FALSE

1. A software developer is the person with the training to design, create, and test computer programs.

ANS: T

2. A computer is a single device that performs different types of tasks for its users.

ANS: F

3. All programs are normally stored in ROM and are loaded into RAM as needed for processing.

ANS: F

4. The instruction set for a microprocessor is unique and is typically understood only by the
microprocessors of the same brand.

ANS: T

5. The CPU understands instructions written in a binary machine language.

ANS: T

6. A bit that is turned off is represented by the value -1.

ANS: F

7. The main reason to use secondary storage is to hold data for long periods of time, even when the
power supply to the computer is turned off.

ANS: T

8. RAM is a volatile memory used for temporary storage while a program is running.

ANS: T

9. The Python language uses a compiler which is a program that both translates and executes the
instructions in a high-level language.
 ANS: F

10. IDLE is an alternative method to using a text editor to write, execute, and test a Python program.

ANS: T

MULTIPLE CHOICE

1. Programs are commonly referred to as

a. system software
b. software
c. application software
d. utility programs
ANS: B

2. Which of the following is considered to be the world's first programmable electronic computer?
a. IBM
b. Dell
c. ENIAC
d. Gateway
ANS: C

3. Where does a computer store a program and the data that the program is working with while the
program is running?
a. in main memory
b. in the CPU
c. in secondary storage
d. in the microprocessor
ANS: A

4. What type of volatile memory is usually used only for temporary storage while running a program?
a. ROM
b. TMM
c. RAM
d. TVM
ANS: C

5. Which of the following is not a microprocessor manufacturing company?

a. Intel
b. Dell
c. AMD
d. Motorola
ANS: B

6. Which computer language uses short words known as mnemonics for writing programs?
a. Assembly
 b. Java
c. Pascal
d. Visual Basic
ANS: A

7. The process known as the __________ cycle is used by the CPU to execute instructions in a program.
a. decode-fetch-execute
b. decode-execute-fetch
c. fetch-decode-execute
d. fetch-execute-decode
ANS: C

8. Which language is referred to as a low-level language?

a. C++
b. Assembly language
c. Java
d. Python
ANS: B

9. The following is an example of an instruction written in which computer language?

10110000
a. Assembly language
b. Java
c. machine language
d. C#
ANS: C

10. The encoding technique used to store negative numbers in the computer's memory is called
a. Unicode
b. ASCII
c. floating-point notation
d. two's complement
ANS: D

11. The __________ coding scheme contains a set of 128 numeric codes that are used to represent
characters in the computer's memory.
a. Unicode
b. ASCII
c. ENIAC
d. two's complement
ANS: B

12. The smallest storage location in a computer's memory is known as a

a. byte
b. ketter
c. switch
 d. bit
ANS: D

13. What is the largest value that can be stored in one byte?
a. 255
b. 128
c. 8
d. 65535
ANS: A

14. The disk drive is a secondary storage device that stores data by __________ encoding it onto a
spinning circular disk.
a. electrically
b. magnetically
c. digitally
d. optically
ANS: B

15. A __________ has no moving parts and operates faster than a traditional disk drive.
a. DVD drive
b. solid state drive
c. jumper drive
d. hyper drive
ANS: B

16. Which of the following is not a major component of a typical computer system?
a. the CPU
b. main memory
c. the operating system
d. secondary storage devices
ANS: C

17. Which type of error prevents the program from running?

a. syntax
b. human
c. grammatical
d. logical
ANS: A

18. What is the decimal value of the following binary number?

10011101
a. 157
b. 8
c. 156
d. 28
ANS: C
MULTIPLE RESPONSE

1. Select all that apply. To create a Python program you can use
a. a text editor
b. a word processor if you save your file as a .docx
c. IDLE
d. Excel
ANS: A, C

COMPLETION

1. A(n) ___________ is a set of instructions that a computer follows to perform a task.

ANS: program

2. The term ___________ refers to all the physical devices that make up a computer.

ANS: hardware

3. The __________ is the part of the computer that actually runs programs and is the most important
component in a computer.

ANS: central processing unit, CPU

4. A disk drive stores data by __________ encoding it onto a circular disk.

ANS: magnetically

5. __________ are small central processing unit chips.

ANS: Microprocessors

6. __________ is a type of memory that can hold data for long periods of time, even when there is no
power to the computer.

ANS: Secondary storage

7. Main memory is commonly known as __________.

ANS: random-access memory, RAM

8. USB drives store data using __________ memory.

ANS: flash

9. The Python __________ is a program that can read Python programming statements and execute them.

ANS: interpreter
10. In __________ mode, the interpreter reads the contents of a file that contains Python statements and
executes each statement.

ANS: script
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Real Charlotte
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The Real Charlotte

Author: E. Oe. Somerville

Martin Ross

Release date: March 27, 2019 [eBook #59138]

Most recently updated: January 24, 2021

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REAL

CHARLOTTE ***
 THE REAL CHARLOTTE

STORIES AND SKETCHES OF

IRISH LIFE.
By E. Œ. Somerville and Martin
Ross.
SOME EXPERIENCES OF AN
IRISH R.M.

With 31 Illustrations by E. Œ.
Somerville.
Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.

FURTHER EXPERIENCES OF AN
IRISH R.M.
With 35 Illustrations by E. Œ.
Somerville.
Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.

IN MR. KNOX’S COUNTRY.

With 8 Illustrations in Colour by E.
Œ. Somerville.
Crown 8vo, 6s.

ALL ON THE IRISH SHORE.

With 10 Illustrations by E. Œ.
Somerville.
Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.

SOME IRISH YESTERDAYS.

With 51 Illustrations by E. Œ.
Somerville.
Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.

AN IRISH COUSIN.
 Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.

THE REAL CHARLOTTE.

Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.

THE SILVER FOX.

Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND
MADRAS

THE

REAL CHARLOTTE
BY

E. Œ. SOMERVILLE & MARTIN ROSS

NEW IMPRESSION

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS

1915
 First published by Ward & Downey, in 3 volumes in 1894, and in one
volume in 1895. Transferred to Longmans, Green & Co. and reprinted by
them in November, 1900, December, 1901, and November, 1903. Reissued
in uniform edition October, 1910; reprinted May, 1911, June, 1915.

Chapter: I., II., III., IV., V., VI., VII., VIII., IX., X., XI., XII., XIII., XIV.,
XV., XVI., XVII., XVIII., XIX., XX., XXI., XXII., XXIII, XXIV., XXV.,
XXVI., XXVII., XXVIII., XXIX., XXX., XXXI., XXXII., XXXIII.,
XXXIV., XXXV., XXXVI., XXXVII., XXXVIII., XXXIX., XL., XLI.,
XLII., XLIII., XLIV., XLV, XLVI., XLVII., XLVIII., XLIX., L., LI.

THE REAL CHARLOTTE.

 CHAPTER I.
An August Sunday afternoon in the north side of Dublin. Epitome of all that
is hot, arid, and empty. Tall brick houses, browbeating each other in gloomy
respectability across the white streets; broad pavements, promenaded
mainly by the nomadic cat; stifling squares, wherein the infant of
unfashionable parentage is taken for the daily baking that is its substitute
for the breezes and the press of perambulators on the Bray Esplanade or the
Kingston pier. Few towns are duller out of the season than Dublin, but the
dullness of its north side neither waxes nor wanes; it is immutable,
unchangeable, fixed as the stars. So at least it appears to the observer whose
impressions are only eye-deep, and are derived from the emptiness of the
streets, the unvarying dirt of the window panes, and the almost forgotten
type of ugliness of the window curtains.
But even an August Sunday in the north side has its distractions for those
who know where to seek them, and there are some of a sufficiently
ingenuous disposition to find in Sunday-school a social excitement that is
independent of fashion, except so far as its slow eddies may have touched
the teacher’s bonnet. Perhaps it is peculiar to Dublin that Sunday-school, as
an institution, is by no means reserved for children of the poorer sort only,
but permeates all ranks, and has as many recruits from the upper and middle
as from the lower classes. Certainly the excellent Mrs. Fitzpatrick, of
Number 0, Mountjoy Square, as she lay in mountainous repose on the sofa
in her dining-room, had no thought that it was derogatory to the dignity of
her daughters and her niece to sit, as they were now sitting, between the
children of her grocer, Mr. Mulvany, and her chemist, Mr. Nolan. Sunday-
school was, in her mind, an admirable institution that at one and the same
time cleared her house of her offspring, and spared her the complications of
their religious training, and her broad, black satin-clad bosom rose and fell
in rhythmic accord with the snores that were the last expression of Sabbath
peace and repose.
It was nearly four o’clock, and the heat and dull clamour in the
schoolhouse were beginning to tell equally upon teachers and scholars.
Francie Fitzpatrick had yawned twice, though she had a sufficient sense of
politeness to conceal the action behind her Bible; the pleasure of thrusting
out in front of her, for the envious regard of her fellows, a new pair of side
spring boots, with mock buttons and stitching, had palled upon her; the
spider that had for a few quivering moments hung uncertainly above the
gorgeous bonnet of Miss Bewley, the teacher, had drawn itself up again,
staggered, no doubt, by the unknown tropic growths it found beneath; and
the silver ring that Tommy Whitty had crammed upon her gloved finger
before school, as a mark of devotion, had become perfectly immovable and
was a source of at least as much anxiety as satisfaction. Even Miss
Bewley’s powers of exposition had melted away in the heat; she had called
out her catechetical reserves, and was reduced to a dropping fire of
questions as to the meaning of Scriptural names, when at length the
superintendent mounted the rostrum and tapped thrice upon it. The closing
hymn was sung, and then, class by class, the hot, tired children clattered out
into the road.
On Francie rested the responsibility of bringing home her four small
cousins, of ages varying from six to eleven, but this duty did not seem to
weigh very heavily on her. She had many acquaintances in the Sunday-
school, and with Susie Brennan’s and Fanny Hemphill’s arms round her
waist, and Tommy Whitty in close attendance, she was in no hurry to go
home. Children are, if unconsciously, as much influenced by good looks as
their elders, and even the raw angularities of fourteen, and Mrs.
Fitzpatrick’s taste in hats, could not prevent Francie from looking extremely
pretty and piquante, as she held forth to an attentive audience on the charms
of a young man who had on that day partaken of an early dinner at her
Uncle Fitzpatrick’s house.
Francie’s accent and mode of expressing herself were alike deplorable;
Dublin had done its worst for her in that respect, but unless the reader has
some slight previous notion of how dreadful a thing is a pure-bred Dublin
accent, it would be impossible for him to realise in any degree the tone in
which she said:
“But oh! Tommy Whitty! wait till I tell you what he said about the
excursion! He said he’d come to it if I’d promise to stay with him the whole
day; so now, see how grand I’ll be! And he has a long black mustash!” she
concluded, as a side thrust at Tommy’s smooth, apple cheeks.
“Oh, indeed, I’m sure he’s a bewty without paint,” returned the slighted
Tommy, with such sarcasm as he could muster; “but unless you come in the
van with me, the way you said you would, I’ll take me ring back from you
and give it to Lizzie Jemmison! So now!”
“Much I care!” said Francie, tossing her long golden plait of hair, and
giving a defiant skip as she walked; “and what’s more, I can’t get it off, and
nobody will till I die! and so now yourself!”
Her left hand was dangling over Fanny Hemphill’s shoulder, and she
thrust it forward, starfish-wise, in front of Tommy Whitty’s face. The silver
ring glittered sumptuously on its background of crimson silk glove, and the
sudden snatch that her swain made at it was as much impelled by an
unworthy desire to repossess the treasure as by the pangs of wounded
affection.
“G’long, ye dirty fella’!” screamed Francie, in high good-humour, at the
same moment eluding the snatch and whirling herself free from the winding
embrace of the Misses Hemphill and Brennan; “I dare ye to take it from
me!”
She was off like a lapwing down the deserted street, pursued by the more
cumbrous Tommy, and by the encouraging yells of the children, who were
trooping along the pavement after them. Francie was lithe and swift beyond
her fellows, and on ordinary occasions Tommy Whitty, with all his
masculine advantage of costume and his two years of seniority, would have
found it as much as he could do to catch her. But on this untoward day the
traitorous new side spring boots played her false. That decorative band of
white stitching across the toes began to press upon her like a vice, and, do
what she would, she knew that she could not keep her lead much longer.
Strategy was her only resource. Swinging herself round a friendly lamp-
post, she stopped short with a suddenness that compelled her pursuer to
shoot past her, and with an inspiration whose very daring made it the more
delirious, she darted across the street, and sprang into a milk-cart that was
waiting at a door. The meek white horse went on at once, and, with a
breathless, goading hiss to hasten him, she tried to gather up the reins.
Unfortunately, however, it happened that these were under his tail, and the
more she tugged at them the tighter he clasped them to him, and the more
lively became his trot. In spite of an irrepressible alarm as to the end of the
adventure, Francie still retained sufficient presence of mind to put out her
tongue at her baffled enemy, as, seated in front of the milk-cans, she
clanked past him and the other children. There was a chorus, in tones
varying from admiration to horror, of, “Oh! look at Francie Fitzpatrick!”
and then Tommy Whitty’s robuster accents, “Ye’d better look out! the
milkman’s after ye!”
Francie looked round, and with terror beheld that functionary in enraged
pursuit. It was vain to try blandishments with the horse, now making for his
stable at a good round trot; vainer still to pull at the reins. They were
nearing the end of the long street, and Francie and the milkman, from their
different points of view, were feeling equally helpless and despairing, when
a young man came round the corner, and apparently taking in the situation
at a glance, ran out into the road, and caught the horse by the bridle.
“Well, upon my word, Miss Francie,” he said, as Miss Fitzpatrick
hurriedly descended from the cart. “You’re a nice young lady! What on
earth are you up to now?”
“Oh, Mr. Lambert—” began Francie; but having got thus far in her
statement, she perceived the justly incensed milkman close upon her, and
once more taking to her heels, she left her rescuer to return the stolen
property with what explanations he could. Round the corner she fled, and
down the next street, till a convenient archway offered a hiding-place, and
sheltering there, she laughed, now that the stress of terror was off her, till
her blue eyes streamed with tears.
Presently she heard footsteps approaching, and peering cautiously out,
saw Lambert striding along with the four Fitzpatrick children dancing round
him, in their anxiety to present each a separate version of the escapade. The
milkman was not to be seen, and Francie sallied forth to meet the party,
secretly somewhat abashed, but resolved to bear an undaunted front before
her cousins.
The “long black mustash,” so adroitly utilised by Francie for the
chastening of Tommy Whitty, was stretched in a wide smile as she looked
tentatively at its owner. “Will he tell Aunt Tish?” was the question that
possessed her as she entered upon her explanation. The children might be
trusted. Their round, white-lashed eyes had witnessed many of her exploits,
and their allegiance had never faltered; but this magnificent grown-up man,
who talked to Aunt Tish and Uncle Robert on terms of equality, what
trouble might he not get her into in his stupid desire to make a good story of
it? “Botheration to him!” she thought, “why couldn’t he have been
somebody else?”
 Mr. Roderick Lambert marched blandly along beside her, with no wish
to change places with anyone agitating his bosom. His handsome brown
eyes rested approvingly on Francie’s flushed face, and the thought that
mainly occupied his mind was surprise that Nosey Fitzpatrick should have
had such a pretty daughter. He was aware of Francie’s diffident glances, but
thought they were due to his good looks and his new suit of clothes, and he
became even more patronising than before. At last, quite unconsciously, he
hit the dreaded point.
“Well, and what do you think your aunt will say when she hears how I
found you running away in the milk-cart?”
“I don’t know,” replied Francie, getting very red.
“Well, what will you say to me if I don’t tell her?”
“Oh, Mr. Lambert, sure you won’t tell mamma!” entreated the
Fitzpatrick children, faithful to their leader. “Francie’d be killed if mamma
thought she was playing with Tommy Whitty!”
They were nearing the Fitzpatrick mansion by this time, and Lambert
stood still at the foot of the steps and looked down at the small group of
petitioners with indulgent self-satisfaction.
“Well, Francie, what’ll you do for me if I don’t tell?”
Francie walked stiffly up the steps.
“I don’t know.” Then with a defiance that she was far from feeling, “You
may tell her if you like!”
Lambert laughed easily as he followed her up the steps.
“You’re very angry with me now, aren’t you? Well, never mind, we’ll be
friends, and I won’t tell on you this time.”
 CHAPTER II.
The east wind was crying round a small house in the outskirts of an Irish
country town. At nightfall it had stolen across the grey expanse of Lough
Moyle, and given its first shudder among the hollies and laurestinas that hid
the lower windows of Tally Ho Lodge from the too curious passer-by, and
at about two o’clock of the November night it was howling so inconsolably
in the great tunnel of the kitchen chimney, that Norry the Boat, sitting on a
heap of turf by the kitchen fire, drew her shawl closer about her shoulders,
and thought gruesomely of the Banshee.
The long trails of the monthly roses tapped and scratched against the
window panes, so loudly sometimes that two cats, dozing on the rusty slab
of a disused hothearth, opened their eyes and stared, with the expressionless
yet wholly alert scrutiny of their race. The objects in the kitchen were
scarcely more than visible in the dirty light of a hanging lamp, and the smell
of paraffin filled the air. High presses and a dresser lined the walls, and on
the top of the dresser, close under the blackened ceiling, it was just possible
to make out the ghostly sleeping form of a cockatoo. A door at the end of
the kitchen opened into a scullery of the usual prosaic, not to say odorous
kind, which was now a cavern of darkness, traversed by twin green stars
that moved to and fro as the lights move on a river at night, and looked like
anything but what they were, the eyes of cats prowling round a scullery
sink.
The tall, yellow-faced clock gave the gurgle with which it was
accustomed to mark the half-hour, and the old woman, as if reminded of her
weariness, stretched out her arms and yawned loudly and dismally.
She put back the locks of greyish-red hair that hung over her forehead,
and, crouching over the fireplace, she took out of the embers a broken-
nosed tea-pot, and proceeded to pour from it a mug of tea, black with long
stewing. She had taken a few sips of it when a bell rang startlingly in the
passage outside, jarring the silence of the house with its sharp outcry. Norry
the Boat hastily put down her mug, and scrambled to her feet to answer its
summons. She groped her way up two cramped flights of stairs that creaked
under her as she went, and advanced noiselessly in her stockinged feet
across a landing to where a chink of light came from under a door.
 The door was opened as she came to it, and a woman’s short thick figure
appeared in the doorway.
“The mistress wants to see Susan,” this person said in a rough whisper;
“is he in the house?”
“I think he’s below in the scullery,” returned Norry; “but, my Law! Miss
Charlotte, what does she want of him? Is it light in her head she is?”
“What’s that to you? Go fetch him at once,” replied Miss Charlotte, with
a sudden fierceness. She shut the door, and Norry crept downstairs again,
making a kind of groaning and lamenting as she went.
Miss Charlotte walked with a heavy step to the fireplace. A lamp was
burning dully on a table at the foot of an old-fashioned bed, and the high
foot-board threw a shadow that made it difficult to see the occupant of the
bed. It was an ordinary little shabby bedroom; the ceiling, seamed with
cracks, bulged down till it nearly touched the canopy of the bed. The wall
paper had a pattern of blue flowers on a yellowish background; over the
chimney-shelf a filmy antique mirror looked strangely refined in the
company of the Christmas cards and discoloured photographs that leaned
against it. There was no sign of poverty, but everything was dingy,
everything was tasteless, from the worn Kidderminster carpet to the
illuminated text that was pinned to the wall facing the bed.
Miss Charlotte gave the fire a frugal poke, and lit a candle in the flame
provoked from the sulky coals. In doing so some ashes became embedded
in the grease, and taking a hair-pin from the ponderous mass of brown hair
that was piled on the back of her head, she began to scrape the candle clean.
Probably at no moment of her forty years of life had Miss Charlotte Mullen
looked more startlingly plain than now, as she stood, her squat figure
draped in a magenta flannel dressing-gown, and the candle light shining
upon her face. The night of watching had left its traces upon even her
opaque skin. The lines about her prominent mouth and chin were deeper
than usual; her broad cheeks had a flabby pallor; only her eyes were bright
and untired, and the thick yellow-white hand that manipulated the hair-pin
was as deft as it was wont to be.
When the flame burned clearly she took the candle to the bedside, and,
bending down, held it close to the face of the old woman who was lying
there. The eyes opened and turned towards the overhanging face: small,
dim, blue eyes, full of the stupor of illness, looking out of the pathetically
commonplace little old face with a far-away perplexity.
“Was that Francie that was at the door?” she said in a drowsy voice that
had in it the lagging drawl of intense weakness.
Charlotte took the tiny wrist in her hand, and felt the pulse with
professional attention. Her broad, perceptive finger-tips gauged the forces
of the little thread that was jerking in the thin network of tendons, and as
she laid the hand down she said to herself, “She’ll not last out the turn of
the night.”
“Why doesn’t Francie come in?” murmured the old woman again in the
fragmentary, uninflected voice that seems hardly spared from the unseen
battle with death.
“It wasn’t her you asked me for at all,” answered Charlotte. “You said
you wanted to say good-bye to Susan. Here, you’d better have a sip of this.”
The old woman swallowed some brandy and water, and the stimulant
presently revived unexpected strength in her.
“Charlotte,” she said, “it isn’t cats we should be thinking of now. God
knows the cats are safe with you. But little Francie, Charlotte; we ought to
have done more for her. You promised me that if you got the money you’d
look after her. Didn’t you now, Charlotte? I wish I’d done more for her.
She’s a good little thing—a good little thing—” she repeated dreamily.
Few people would think it worth their while to dispute the wandering
futilities of an old dying woman, but even at this eleventh hour Charlotte
could not brook the revolt of a slave.
“Good little thing!” she exclaimed, pushing the brandy bottle noisily in
among a crowd of glasses and medicine bottles, “a strapping big woman of
nineteen! You didn’t think her so good the time you had her here, and she
put Susan’s father and mother in the well!”
The old lady did not seem to understand what she had said.
“Susan, Susan!” she called quaveringly, and feebly patted the crochet
quilt.
As if in answer, a hand fumbled at the door and opened it softly. Norry
was standing there, tall and gaunt, holding in her apron, with both hands,
something that looked like an enormous football.
 “Miss Charlotte!” she whispered hoarsely, “here’s Susan for ye. He was
out in the ashpit, an’ I was hard set to get him, he was that wild.”
Even as she spoke there was a furious struggle in the blue apron.
“God in Heaven! ye fool!” ejaculated Charlotte. “Don’t let him go!” She
shut the door behind Norry. “Now, give him to me.”
Norry opened her apron cautiously, and Miss Charlotte lifted out of it a
large grey tom-cat.
“Be quiet, my heart’s love,” she said, “be quiet.”
The cat stopped kicking and writhing, and, sprawling up on to the
shoulder of the magenta dressing-gown, turned a fierce grey face upon his
late captor. Norry crept over to the bed, and put back the dirty chintz curtain
that had been drawn forward to keep out the draught of the door. Mrs.
Mullen was lying very still; she had drawn her knees up in front of her, and
the bedclothes hung sharply from the small point that they made. The big
living old woman took the hand of the other old woman who was so nearly
dead, and pressed her lips to it.
“Ma’am, d’ye know me?”
Her mistress opened her eyes.
“Norry,” she whispered, “give Miss Francie some jam for her tea to-
night, but don’t tell Miss Charlotte.”
“What’s that she’s saying?” said Charlotte, going to the other side of the
bed. “Is she asking for me?”
“No, but for Miss Francie,” Norry answered.
“She knows as well as I do that Miss Francie’s in Dublin,” said Charlotte
roughly; “ ’twas Susan she was asking for last. Here, a’nt, here’s Susan for
you.”
She pulled the cat down from her shoulder, and put him on the bed,
where he crouched with a twitching tail, prepared for flight at a moment’s
notice.
He was within reach of the old lady’s hand, but she did not seem to
know that he was there. She opened her eyes and looked vacantly round.
“Where’s little Francie? You mustn’t send her away, Charlotte; you
promised you’d take care of her; didn’t you, Charlotte?”
 “Yes, yes,” said Charlotte quickly, pushing the cat towards the old lady;
“never fear, I’ll see after her.”
Old Mrs. Mullen’s eyes, that had rested with a filmy stare on her niece’s
face, closed again, and her head began to move a little from one side to the
other, a low monotonous moan coming from her lips with each turn.
Charlotte took her right hand and laid it on the cat’s brindled back. It rested
there, unconscious, for some seconds, while the two women looked on in
silence, and then the fingers drooped and contracted like a bird’s claw, and
the moaning ceased. There was at the same time a spasmodic movement of
the gathered-up knees, and a sudden rigidity fell upon the small
insignificant face.
Norry the Boat threw herself upon her knees with a howl, and began to
pray loudly. At the sound the cat leaped to the floor, and the hand that had
been placed upon him in the only farewell his mistress was to take, dropped
stiffly on the bed. Miss Charlotte snatched up the candle, and held it close
to her aunt’s face. There was no mistaking what she saw there, and, putting
down the candle again, she plucked a large silk handkerchief from her
pocket, and, with some hideous preliminary heavings of her shoulders, burst
into transports of noisy grief.
 CHAPTER III.
A damp winter and a chilly spring had passed in their usual mildly
disagreeable manner over that small Irish country town which was alluded
to in the beginning of the last chapter. The shop windows had exhibited
their usual zodiacal succession, and had progressed through red comforters
and woollen gloves, to straw hats, tennis shoes, and coloured Summer
Numbers. The residents of Lismoyle were already congratulating each other
on having “set” their lodgings to the summer visitors; the steamer was
plying on the lake, the militia was under canvas, and on this very fifteenth
of June, Lady Dysart of Bruff was giving her first lawn-tennis party.
Miss Charlotte Mullen had taken advantage of the occasion to emerge
from the mourning attire that since her aunt’s death had so misbecome her
sallow face, and was driving herself to Bruff in the phæton that had been
Mrs. Mullen’s, and a gown chosen with rather more view to effect than was
customary with her. She was under no delusion as to her appearance, and,
early recognising its hopeless character, she had abandoned all superfluities
of decoration. A habit of costume so defiantly simple as to border on
eccentricity had at least two advantages; it freed her from the absurdity of
seeming to admire herself, and it was cheap. During the late Mrs. Mullen’s
lifetime Charlotte had studied economy. The most reliable old persons had,
she was wont to reflect, a slippery turn in them where their wills were
concerned, and it was well to be ready for any contingency of fortune.
Things had turned out very well after all; there had been one inconvenient
legacy—that “Little Francie” to whom the old lady’s thoughts had turned,
happily too late for her to give any practical emphasis to them—but that
bequest was of the kind that may be repudiated if desirable. The rest of the
disposition had been admirably convenient, and, in skilled hands,
something might even be made of that legacy. Miss Mullen thought a great
deal about her legacy and the steps she had taken with regard to it as she
drove to Bruff. The horse that drew her ancient phæton moved with a
dignity befitting his eight and twenty years; the three miles of level lake-
side road between Lismoyle and Bruff were to him a serious undertaking,
and by the time he had arrived at his destination, his mistress’s active mind
had pursued many pleasant mental paths to their utmost limit.
 This was the first of the two catholic and comprehensive entertainments
that Lady Dysart’s sense of her duty towards her neighbours yearly
impelled her to give, and when Charlotte, wearing her company smile,
came down the steps of the terrace to meet her hostess, the difficult revelry
was at its height. Lady Dysart had cast her nets over a wide expanse, and
the result was not encouraging. She stood, tall, dark and majestic, on the
terrace, surveying the impracticable row of women that stretched, forlorn of
men, along one side of the tennis grounds, much as Cassandra might have
scanned the beleaguering hosts from the ramparts of Troy; and as she
advanced to meet her latest guest, her strong, clear-eyed face was perplexed
and almost tragic.
“How do you do, Miss Mullen?” she said in tones of unconcealed
gloom. “Have you ever seen so few men in your life? and there are five and
forty women! I cannot imagine where they have all come from, but I know
where I wish they would take themselves to, and that is to the bottom of the
lake!”
The large intensity of Lady Dysart’s manner gave unintended weight to
her most trivial utterance, and had she reflected very deeply before she
spoke, it might have occurred to her that this was not a specially fortunate
manner of greeting a female guest. But Charlotte understood that nothing
personal was intended; she knew that the freedom of Bruff had been given
to her, and that she could afford to listen to abuse of the outer world with
the composure of one of the inner circle.
“Well, your ladyship,” she said, in the bluff, hearty voice which she felt
accorded best with the theory of herself that she had built up in Lady
Dysart’s mind, “I’ll head a forlorn hope to the bottom of the lake for you,
and welcome; but for the honour of the house, you might give me a cup o’
tay first!”
Charlotte had many tones of voice, according with the many facets of
her character, and when she wished to be playful she affected a vigorous
brogue, not perhaps being aware that her own accent scarcely admitted of
being strengthened.
This refinement of humour was probably wasted on Lady Dysart. She
was an Englishwoman, and, as such, was constitutionally unable to discern
perfectly the subtle grades of Irish vulgarity. She was aware that many of
the ladies on her visiting list were vulgar, but it was their subjects of
conversation and their opinions that chiefly brought the fact home to her.
Miss Mullen, au fond, was probably no less vulgar than they, but she was
never dull, and Lady Dysart would suffer anything rather than dulness. It
was less than nothing to her that Charlotte’s mother was reported to have
been in her youth a national schoolmistress, and her grandmother a bare-
footed country girl. These facts of Miss Mullen’s pedigree were valued
topics in Lismoyle, but Lady Dysart’s serene radicalism ignored the
inequalities of a lower class, and she welcomed a woman who could talk to
her on spiritualism, or books, or indeed on any current topic, with a point
and agreeability that made her accent, to English ears, merely the
expression of a vigorous individuality. She now laughed in response to her
visitor’s jest, but her eye did not cease from roving over the gathering, and
her broad brow was still contracted in calculation.
“I never knew the country so bereft of men or so peopled with girls!
Even the little Barrington boys are off with the militia, and everyone about
has conspired to fill their houses with women, and not only women but
dummies!” Her glance lighted on the long bench where sat the more
honourable women in midge-bitten dulness. “And there is Kate Gascogne in
one of her reveries, not hearing a word that Mrs. Waller is saying to her—”
With Lady Dysart intention was accomplishment as nearly as might be.
She had scarcely finished speaking before she began a headlong advance
upon the objects of her diatribe, making a short cut across the corner of a
lawn-tennis court, and scarcely observing the havoc that her transit wrought
in the game. Charlotte was less rash. She steered her course clear of the
tennis grounds, and of the bench of matrons, passed the six Miss Beatties
with a comprehensive “How are ye, girls?” and took up her position under
one of the tall elm trees.
Under the next tree a few men were assembled, herding together for
mutual protection after the manner of men, and laying down the law to each
other about road sessions, the grand jury, and Irish politics generally. They
were a fairly representative trio; a country gentleman with a grey moustache
and a loud voice in which he was announcing that nothing would give him
greater pleasure than to pull the rope at the execution of a certain English
statesman; a slight, dejected-looking clergyman, who vied with Major
Waller in his denunciations, but chastenedly, like an echo in a cathedral
aisle; and a smartly dressed man of about thirty-five, of whom a more
detailed description need not be given, as he has been met with in the first
chapter, and the six years after nine-and-twenty do little more than mellow a
man’s taste in checks, and sprinkle a grey hair or two on his temples.
Miss Mullen listened for a few minutes to the melancholy pessimisms of
the archdeacon, and then, interrupting Major Waller in a fine outburst on the
advisability of martial law, she thrust herself and her attendant cloud of
midges into the charmed circle of the smoke of Mr. Lambert’s cigarette.
“Ho! do I hear me old friend the Major at politics?” she said, shaking
hands effusively with the three men. “I declare I’m a better politician than
any one of you! D’ye know how I served Tom Casey, the land-leaguing
plumber, yesterday? I had him mending my tank, and when I got him into it
I whipped the ladder away, and told him not a step should he budge till he
sang ‘God save the Queen!’ I was arguing there half an hour with him in
water up to his middle before I converted him, and then it wasn’t so much
the warmth of his convictions as the cold of his legs made him tune up. I
call that practical politics!”
The speed and vigour with which this story was told would have
astounded anyone who did not know Miss Mullen’s powers of narration,
but Mr. Lambert, to whom it seemed specially addressed, merely took his
cigarette out of his mouth, and said, with a familiar laugh:
“Practical politics, by Jove! I call it a cold water cure. Kill or cure like
the rest of your doctoring, eh! Charlotte?”
Miss Mullen joined with entire good-humour in the laugh that followed.
“Oh, th’ ingratitude of man!” she exclaimed. “Archdeacon, you’ve seen
his bald scalp from the pulpit, and I ask you, now, isn’t that a fresh crop he
has on it? I leave it to his conscience, if he has one, to say if it wasn’t my
doctoring gave him that fine black thatch he has now!”
The archdeacon fixed his eyes seriously upon her; Charlotte’s
playfulness always alarmed and confused him.
“Do not appeal to me, Miss Mullen,” he answered, in his refined,
desponding voice; “my unfortunate sight makes my evidence in such a
matter worth nothing; and, by the way, I meant to ask you if your niece
would be good enough to help us in the choir? I understand she sings.”
Charlotte interrupted him.
“There’s another of you at it!” she exclaimed. “I think I’ll have to
advertiss in the Irish Times that, whereas my first cousin, Isabella Mullen,
married Johnny Fitzpatrick, who was no relation of mine, good, bad, or
indifferent, their child is my first cousin once removed, and not my niece!”
Mr. Lambert blew a cloud of smoke through his nose.
“You’re a nailer at pedigrees, Charlotte,” he said with a patronage that he
knew was provoking; “but as far as I can make out the position, it comes to
mighty near the same thing; you’re what they call her Welsh aunt, anyhow.”
Charlotte’s face reddened, and she opened her wide mouth for a retort,
but before she had time for more than the champings as of a horse with a
heavy bit, which preceded her more incisive repartees, another person
joined the group.
“Mr. Lambert,” said Pamela Dysart, in her pleasant, anxious voice, “I am
going to ask you if you will play in the next set, or if you would rather help
the Miss Beatties to get up a round of golf? How do you do, Miss Mullen? I
have not seen you before; why did you not bring your niece with you?”
Charlotte showed all her teeth in a forced smile as she replied, “I
suppose you mean my cousin, Miss Dysart; she won’t be with me till the
day after to-morrow.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” replied Pamela, with the sympathetic politeness that
made strangers think her manner too good to be true; “and Mr. Lambert
tells me she plays tennis so well.”
“Why, what does he know about her tennis playing?” said Charlotte,
turning sharply towards Lambert.
The set on the nearer court was over, and the two young men who had
played in it strolled up to the group as she spoke. Mr. Lambert expanded his
broad chest, gave his hat an extra tilt over his nose, and looked rather more
self-complacent than usual as he replied:
“Well, I ought to know something about it, seeing I took her in hand
when she was in short petticoats—taught her her paces myself, in fact.”
Mr. Hawkins, the shorter of the two players who had just come up,
ceased from mopping his scarlet face, and glanced from Mr. Lambert to
Pamela with a countenance devoid of expression, save that conferred by the
elevation of one eyebrow almost to the roots of his yellow hair. Pamela’s
eyes remained unresponsive, but the precipitancy with which she again
addressed herself to Mr. Lambert showed that a disposition to laugh had
been near.
 Charlotte turned away with an expression that was the reverse of
attractive. When her servants saw that look they abandoned excuse or
discussion; when the Lismoyle beggars saw it they checked the flow of
benediction and fled. Even the archdeacon, through the religious halo that
habitually intervened between him and society, became aware that the
moment was not propitious for speaking to Miss Mullen about his proposed
changes in the choir, and he drifted away to think of diocesan matters, and
to forget as far as possible that he was at a lawn-tennis party.
Outside the group stood the young man who had been playing in the set
with Mr. Hawkins. He was watching through an eyeglass the limp progress
of the game in the other court, and was even making praiseworthy attempts
to applaud the very feeble efforts of the players. He was tall and slight, with
a near-sighted stoop, and something of an old-fashioned, eighteenth century
look about him that was accentuated by his not wearing a moustache, and
was out of keeping with the flannels and brilliant blazer that are the
revolutionary protest of this age against its orthodox clothing. It did not
seem to occur to him that he was doing anything unusual in occupying
himself, as he was now doing, in picking up balls for the Lismoyle curate
and his partner; he would have thought it much more remarkable had he
found in himself a preference for doing anything else. This was an
occupation that demanded neither interest nor conversation, and of a
number of disagreeable duties he did not think that he had chosen the worst.
Charlotte walked up to him as he stood leaning against a tree, and held
out her hand.
“How d’ye do, Mr. Dysart?” she said with marked politeness. All trace
of combat had left her manner, and the smile with which she greeted him
was sweet and capacious. “We haven’t seen you in Lismoyle since you
came back from the West Indies.”
Christopher Dysart let his eyeglass fall, and looked apologetic as he
enclosed her well-filled glove in his long hand, and made what excuses he
could for not having called upon Miss Mullen.
“Since Captain Thesiger has got this new steam-launch I can’t call my
soul my own; I’m out on the lake with him half the day, and the other half I
spend with a nail-brush trying to get the blacks off.”
He spoke with a hesitation that could hardly be called a stammer, but
was rather a delaying before his sentences, a mental rather than a physical
uncertainty.
“Oh, that’s a very poor excuse,” said Charlotte with loud affability,
“deserting your old friends for the blacks a second time! I thought you had
enough of them in the last two years! And you know you promised—or
your good mother did for you—that you’d come and photograph poor old
Mrs. Tommy before she died. The poor thing’s so sick now we have to feed
her with a baby’s bottle.”
Christopher wondered if Mrs. Tommy were the cook, and was on the
point of asking for further particulars, when Miss Mullen continued:
“She’s the great-great-grandmother of all me cats, and I want you to
immortalise her; but don’t come till after Monday, as I’d like to introduce
you to my cousin, Miss Fitzpatrick; did you hear she was coming?”
“Yes, Mr. Lambert told us she was to be here next week,” said
Christopher, with an indescribable expression that was not quite
amusement, but was something more than intelligence.
“What did he say of her?”
Christopher hesitated; somehow what he remembered of Mr. Lambert’s
conversation was of too free and easy a nature for repetition to Miss
Fitzpatrick’s cousin.
“He—er—seemed to think her very—er—charming in all ways,” he said
rather lamely.
“So it’s talking of charming young ladies you and Roddy Lambert are
when he comes to see you on estate business!” said Charlotte archly, but
with a rasp in her voice. “When my poor father was your father’s agent, and
I used to be helping him in the office, it was charming young cattle we
talked about, and not young ladies.”
Christopher laughed in a helpless way.
“I wish you were at the office still, Miss Mullen; if anyone could
understand the Land Act I believe it would be you.”
At this moment there was an upheaval among the matrons; the long line
rose and broke, and made for the grey stone house whose windows were
flashing back the sunlight through the trees at the end of the lawn-tennis
grounds. The tedious skirmish with midges, and the strain of inactivity,
were alike over for the present, and the conscience of the son of the house
reminded him that he ought to take Miss Mullen in to tea.
 CHAPTER IV.
There was consternation among the cats at Tally Ho Lodge; a consternation
mingled with righteous resentment. Even the patriarchal Susan could
scarcely remember the time that the spare bedroom had been anything else
than an hospital, a nursery, and a secure parliament house for him and his
descendants; yet now, in his old age, and when he had, after vast
consideration of alternatives, allocated to himself the lowest shelf of the
wardrobe as a sleeping place, he was evicted at a moment’s notice, and the
folded-away bed curtains that had formed his couch were even now
perfuming the ambient air as they hung out of the window over the hall
door. Susan was too dignified to give utterance to his wounded feelings; he
went away by himself, and sitting on the roof of the fowl-house, thought
unutterable things. But his great-niece, Mrs. Bruff, could not emulate his
stoicism. Followed by her five latest kittens, she strode through the house,
uttering harsh cries of rage and despair, and did not cease from her
lamentations until Charlotte brought the whole party into the drawing-room,
and established them in the waste-paper basket.
The worst part about the upheaval, as even the youngest and least
experienced of the cats could see, was that it was irrevocable. It was early
morning when the first dull blow of Norry’s broom against the wainscot had
startled them with new and strange apprehension, and incredulity had
grown to certainty, till the final moment when the sight of a brimming pail
of water urged them to panic-struck flight. It may be admitted that Norry
the Boat, who had not, as a rule, any special taste for cleanliness, had
seldom enjoyed anything more than this day of turmoil, this routing of her
ancient enemies. Miss Charlotte, to whom on ordinary occasions the
offended cat never appealed in vain, was now bound by her own word. She
had given orders that the spare room was to be “cleaned down,” and
cleaned down it surely should be. It was not, strictly speaking, Norry’s
work. Louisa was house and parlour-maid; Louisa, a small and sullen
Protestant orphan of unequalled sluggishness and stupidity, for whose
capacity for dealing with any emergency Norry had a scorn too deep for any
words that might conveniently be repeated here. It was not likely that
Louisa would be permitted to join in the ardours of the campaign, when
even Bid Sal, Norry’s own special kitchen-slut and co-religionist, was not
allowed to assist.
Norry the Boat, daughter of Shaunapickeen, the ferryman (whence her
title), and of Carroty Peg, his wife, was a person with whom few would
have cared to co-operate against her will. On this morning she wore a more
ferocious aspect than usual. Her roughly-waving hair, which had never
known the dignity of a cap, was bound up in a blue duster, leaving her bony
forehead bare; dust and turf-ashes hung in her grizzled eyebrows, her arms
were smeared with black-lead, and the skirt of her dress was girt about her
waist, displaying a petticoat of heavy Galway flannel, long thin legs, and
enormous feet cased in countrymen’s laced boots. It was fifteen years now,
Norry reflected, while she scrubbed the floor and scraped the candle
drippings off it with her nails, since Miss Charlotte and the cats had come
into the house, and since then the spare room had never had a visitor in it.
Nobody had stayed in the house in all those years except little Miss Francie,
and for her the cot had been made up in her great-aunt’s room; the old high-
sided cot in which her grandmother had slept when she was a child. The cot
had long since migrated into the spare room, and from it Norry had just
ejected the household effects of Mrs. Bruff and her family, with a pleasure
that was mitigated only by the thought that Miss Francie was a young
woman now, and would be likely to give a good deal more trouble in the
house than even in the days when she stole the cockatoo’s sopped toast for
her private consumption, and christened the tom-cat Susan against
everyone’s wishes except her great-aunt’s.
Norry and the cockatoo were now the only survivors of the old régime at
Tally Ho Lodge, in fact the cockatoo was regarded in Lismoyle as an almost
prehistoric relic, dating, at the lowest computation, from the days when old
Mrs. Mullen’s fox-hunting father had lived there, and given the place the
name that was so remarkably unsuited to its subsequent career. The
cockatoo was a sprightly creature of some twenty shrieking summers on the
day that the two Miss Butlers, clad in high-waisted, low-necked gowns,
were armed past his perch in the hall by their father, and before, as it
seemed to the cockatoo, he had more than half-finished his morning doze,
they were back again, this time on the arms of the two young men who,
during the previous five months, had done so much to spoil his digestion by
propitiatory dainties at improper hours. The cockatoo had no very clear
recollection of the subsequent departure of Dr. Mullen and his brother, the
attorney, with their brides, on their respective honeymoons, owing to the
fact that Mr. Mullen, the agent, brother of the two bridegrooms, had prised
open his beak, and compelled him to drink the healths of the happy couples
in the strongest and sweetest whisky punch.
The cockatoo’s memory after this climax was filled with vague comings
and goings, extending over unknown tracts of time. He remembered two
days of disturbance, on each of which a long box had been carried out of
the house by several men, and a crowd of people, dressed in black, had
eaten a long and clattering meal in the dining-room. He had always
remembered the second of these occasions with just annoyance, because, in
manœuvring the long box through the narrow hall, he had been knocked off
his perch, and never after that day had the person whom he had been taught
to call “Doctor” come to give him his daily lump of sugar.
But the day that enunciated itself most stridently from the cockatoo’s
past life was that on which the doctor’s niece had, after many short visits,
finally arrived with several trunks, and a wooden case from which, when
opened, sprang four of the noisome creatures whom Miss Charlotte, their
owner, had taught him to call “pussies.” A long era of persecution then
began for him, of robbery of his food, and even attacks upon his person. He
had retaliated by untiring mimicry, by delusive invitations to food in the
manner of Miss Charlotte, and lastly, by the strangling of a too-confiding
kitten, whom he had lured, with maternal mewings, within reach of his
claws. That very day Miss Charlotte’s hand avenged the murder, and
afterwards conveyed him, a stiff guilty lump of white feathers, to the top of
the kitchen press, from thenceforth never to descend, except when long and
patient picking had opened a link of his chain, or when, on fine days, Norry
fastened him to a branch of the tall laurel that overhung the pig-stye. Norry
was his only friend, a friendship slowly cemented by a common hatred of
the cats and Louisa; indeed, it is probable that but for occasional
conversation with Norry he would have choked from his own misanthropic
fury, helpless, lonely spectator as he was of the secret gluttonies of Louisa,
and the maddening domestic felicity of the cats.
But on this last day of turbulence and rout he had been forgotten. The
kitchen was sunny and stuffy, the blue-bottles were buzzing their loudest in
the cobwebby window, one colony of evicted kittens was already beginning
to make the best of things in the turf heap, and the leaves of the laurel
outside were gleaming tropically against the brilliant sky, with no one to
appreciate them except the pigs. When it came to half-past twelve o’clock
the cockatoo could no longer refrain, and fell to loud and prolonged
screamings. The only result at first was a brief stupefaction on the part of
the kittens, and an answering outcry from the fowl in the yard; then, after
some minutes, the green baize cross-door opened, and a voice bellowed
down the passage:
“Biddy! Bid Sal!” (fortissimo), “can’t ye stop that bird’s infernal
screeching?” There was dead silence, and Miss Mullen advanced into the
kitchen and called again.
“Biddy’s claning herself, Miss Mullen,” said a small voice from the
pantry door.
“That’s no reason you shouldn’t answer!” thundered Charlotte; “come
out here yourself and put the cockatoo out in the yard.”
Louisa the orphan, a short, fat, white-faced girl of fourteen, shuffled out
of the pantry with her chin buried in her chest, and her round terrified eyes
turned upwards to Miss Charlotte’s face.
“I’d be in dhread to ketch him,” she faltered.
Those ladies who considered Miss Mullen “eccentric, but so kind-
hearted, and so clever and agreeable,” would have been considerably
surprised if they had heard the terms in which she informed Louisa that she
was wanting in courage and intelligence; but Louisa’s face expressed no
surprise, only a vacancy that in some degree justified her mistress’s
language. Still denouncing her retainers, Miss Charlotte mounted nimbly
upon a chair, and seizing the now speechless cockatoo by the wings, carried
him herself out to the yard and fastened him to his accustomed laurel
bough.
She did not go back to the kitchen, but, after a searching glance at the
contents of the pigs’ trough, went out of the yard by the gate that led to the
front of the house. Rhododendrons and laurels made a dark green tunnel
about her, and, though it was June, the beech leaves of last November lay
rotting on each side of the walk. Opposite the hall door the ground rose in a
slight slope, thickly covered with evergreens, and topped by a lime-tree, on
whose lower limbs a flock of black turkeys had ranged themselves in
sepulchral meditation. The house itself was half stifled with ivy, monthly
roses, and virginian creeper; everywhere was the same unkempt profusion
of green things, that sucked the sunshine into themselves, and left the air
damp and shadowed. Charlotte had the air of thinking very deeply as she
walked slowly along with her hands in the pockets of her black alpaca
apron. The wrinkles on her forehead almost touched the hair that grew so
low down upon it as to seem like a wig that had been pulled too far over the
turn of the brow, and she kept chewing at her heavy underlip as was her
habit during the processes of unobserved thought. Then she went into the
house, and, sitting down at the davenport in the dining-room, got out a sheet
of her best notepaper, and wrote a note to Pamela Dysart in her strong,
commercially clear hand.
Afternoon tea had never flourished as an institution at Tally Ho Lodge.
Occasionally, and of necessity, a laboured repast had been served at five
o’clock by the trembling Louisa; occasions on which the afternoon caller
had not only to suffer the spectacle of a household being shaken to its
foundations on her behalf, but had subsequently to eat of the untempting
fruit of these struggles. On the afternoon, however, of the day following that
of the cleansing of the spare room, timely preparations had been made. Half
the round table in the centre of the drawing-room had been covered with a
cloth, and on it Louisa, in the plenitude of her zeal, had prepared a
miniature breakfast; loaf, butter-cooler, and knives and forks, a truly
realistic touch being conferred by two egg-cups standing in the slop-basin.
A vase of marigolds and pink sweet-pea stood behind these, a fresh heap of
shavings adorned the grate, the piano had been opened and dusted, and a
copy of the “Indiana Waltzes” frisked on the desk in the breeze from the
open window.
Charlotte sat in a low armchair and surveyed her drawing-room with a
good deal of satisfaction. Her fingers moved gently through the long fur at
the back of Mrs. Bruff’s head, administering, almost unconsciously, the
most delicately satisfactory scratching about the base of the wide, sensitive
ears, while her eyes wandered back to the pages of the novel that lay open
on her lap. She was a great and insatiable reader, surprisingly well
acquainted with the classics of literature, and unexpectedly lavish in the
purchase of books. Her neighbours never forgot to mention, in describing
her, the awe-inspiring fact that she “took in the English Times and the
Saturday Review, and read every word of them,” but it was hinted that the
bookshelves that her own capable hands had put up in her bedroom held a
large proportion of works of fiction of a startlingly advanced kind, “and,” it
was generally added in tones of mystery, “many of them French.”