Charlotte Stant

“ And then as the girl, with one of her so deeply and oddly, yet so tenderly, critical looks at him, failed to take up the remark, he found himself moved, as by a vague anxiety, to add a question. “Don’t you think he’s charming?”
“Oh, charming,” said Charlotte Stant. “If he weren’t I shouldn’t mind.”
“No more should I!” her friend harmoniously returned.
“Ah, but you DON’T mind. You don’t have to. You don’t have to, I mean, as I have. It’s the last folly ever to care, in an anxious way, the least particle more than one is absolutely forced. ”

“ We happen each, I think, to be of the kind that are easily spoiled."
Her friend, again, for propriety, followed the argument. "Oh, I don't know. May not one's affection for her do something more for one's decency, as you call it, than her own generosity—her own affection, HER 'decency'—has the unfortunate virtue to undo?"
"Ah, of course it must be all in that."
But she had made her question, all the same, interesting to him. "What it comes to—one can see what you mean—is the way she believes in one. That is if she believes at all."
"Yes, that's what it comes to," said Charlotte Stant. ”

“ The Prince, with immediate gaiety, threw back his head. “What do you mean by ‘properly’? I somehow see volumes in it. It’s the way people put a thing when they put it—well, wrong. I put things right. What is it that has happened for me?”
His hostess, the next moment, had drawn spirit from his tone.
“Oh, I shall be delighted if you’ll take your share of it. Charlotte Stant is in London. She has just been here.”
“Miss Stant? Oh really?” The Prince expressed clear surprise—a transparency through which his eyes met his friend’s with a certain hardness of concussion. ”

“ Charlotte suddenly paused to ask herself, as she made her toilette for the second time that afternoon, why she should be taking such pains with herself, why she studied her own face in the cheval mirror so long, and tried three different flowers in her hair.
Then she heard the rattle of carriage wheels along the gravel driveway that curled and twisted down to the great iron gates. She looked out. Yet even as she felt a wayward flutter of her heart a little burst of laughter broke from her lips. ”

“ XIV The open course of fate always seemed so frustrated with side-issues; the world went so crookedly always; in the whirlpools and backwaters of existence hopes and wishes and realities were forever getting so inextricably mixed and tangled and torn! Such were the thoughts that ran disjointedly through Charlotte's contrite and unhappy head, after a weary day of self-disgust and self-discovery.
She would have flown to Dorat on the wings of love, she would have hastened to him, open-armed and humble-hearted; but once more she found that emotion and opportunity did not always coincide. ”

“ The gloomy emptiness of the house, the draped chairs and the draped balconies gave Charlotte a sense of phantasmal and subterranean life.
“I feel like a ghost!” she whispered to Meran, close at her side.
“But imagine it all this time to-morrow night!” he whispered back to her.
Out of the blackness the glare of the footlights suddenly shot up. Shadowy musicians, with instruments under their arms, seemed drifting out from some still more shadowy underworld. They took their places at the music-desks, where, at a touch of the hand, a shaft of light flashed down on the white score-sheets. ”

“ The turkey-hen looked so pleased as she recalled this conjugal endearment that Charlotte could not resist the pleasure of taking her down a peg or two.
“I think he’s quite right,” she said with a laugh; “nothing ages ye like fat, and no man likes to see his wife turning into an old woman.”
Poor Mrs. Lambert took the snub meekly, as was her wont. “Well, anyway, it’s a comfort to feel a little stronger, Charlotte; isn’t it what they say, ‘laugh and grow fat.’” She took off her dolman and rang the bell for tea. “Tell me, Charlotte,” she went on, “did you hear anything about that poor Miss Duffy?” ”

“ When she took Charlotte she took Charlotte’s foundling too: a dark-haired child with pale brown eyes, and the odd incisive manner of children who have lived too much with their elders. The little girl was called Tina Lovell: it was vaguely supposed that Charlotte had adopted her. She grew up on terms of affectionate equality with her young Ralston cousins, and almost as much so—it might be said—with the two women who mothered her. But, impelled by an instinct of imitation which no one took the trouble to correct, she always called Delia Ralston “Mamma,” and{89} Charlotte Lovell “Aunt Chatty.” ”

“ Her father died in 1604, and Charlotte spent most of her early days at Thouars, occasionally paying visits to her relatives at The Hague. Her mother came to England in 1625 in the train of Charles I's queen, Henrietta Maria, and during her visit arranged a marriage between Charlotte and James Stanley, lord Strange (afterwards seventh Earl of Derby) [q. v.] Charlotte was then staying at The Hague with Elizabeth, the daughter of James I and fugitive queen of Bohemia, whose husband, Frederick V, was Charlotte's cousin. ”

“ It was now Charlotte’s turn to frown. And this she did as a prelude to a frankness which verged upon the brutal.
“All very well, my friend, but perhaps you’ll tell me how it’s to be done. Neither Marjorie nor Blanche has the least power of attraction. They’re hopeless. And please remember this young man has been five years in America.”
“I would to God he had stayed there!”
The futile outburst of his Grace set Charlotte glowering like a sibyl. She was constrained to own that it was all intensely annoying. He was a common young man. He had none of the Dinneford feeling about things. ”

“ She drew herself up and looked down gravely, almost compassionately, upon the woman who had been Nettie Trent.
“I was Charlotte Hastings before my marriage,” she said. “I am sorry to be the one to hurt you, but you have been cruelly treated. I was married to Emory Blake before he left home for the school.”
The smaller woman gave a little gasp and stood silent, while Charlotte, with the fire in her veins scorching her cheeks and eyes and almost smothering her breath, waited for her to offer some resistance, to assert her own claim, or to ask for proof of the statement which denied it ”

“ But even to the aloofness of philosophers there’s a limit, my friend. You must know that there is only one subject in all our minds just now.”
The Duke, a concentrated gaze upon Charlotte, did not allow himself to admit anything of the kind. For one thing they were lifelong adversaries. Charlotte was a meddlesome woman, an intriguer and a busybody in the sacred name of Family. They had tried many a fall with each other in the past, and although Providence in making Albert John the head of the house had given him an unfair advantage, he was often hard set by Charlotte’s malice and persistency. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 face of his Grace underwent a sudden change at the sight of this unwelcome visitor.
Charlotte seated herself ponderously. And then having allowed a moment’s pause for dramatic effect, she [Pg 150] said, marking her brother with an intent eye, “The plot thickens.”
“Plot?” he said, warily.
“Do you wish me to believe that you have not heard the latest development?”
“Why speak in riddles, Charlotte?” He was trying to suppress a growing irritability.
Charlotte smiled frostily. “One should make allowances, no doubt, for natural simplicity. ”

“ Everything was against her. Lambert’s business had, as he expected, taken him to Dublin, and kept him there; Cursiter, like most men, was chary of active interference in another man’s affairs, whatever his private opinion might be; and Charlotte, that guardian of youth, that trusty and vigilant spy, sat in her own room writing interminable letters, or went on long and complicated shopping expeditions whenever Hawkins came to the house.
On this golden, still afternoon, Francie strayed out soon after lunch, half dazed with unhappiness and excitement. To-night her husband would come home. ”

“ Charlotte put her arms about her, drew [Pg 282] her to the sofa, and sat by her. “Poor dear,” she said; “poor dear.”
Molly drooped, trembled, then turned and clung to her, crying piteously. “You’re sorry for me? I did it because I’m afraid. He said they all come down here to die. Malise don’t know, she don’t understand, she’s hard.”
“You go down to your dinner, Alexina,” said Charlotte; “it’s waiting. Oh, yes, yes you will go.” There was finality in the tone, very different from Charlotte’s usually indefinite directions. “Leave your mother to me ”

“ Charlotte cried a little, as they drove homeward, although she tried to tell herself that the day had in every way been auspicious.
She watched, anxiously and fearfully, for some slightest change of tone or attitude in Dorat; but he was even more tender and quietly thoughtful than before. After all, she argued with herself, in her hour of final surrender, the great artist must always be the great lover. It was only that her whole nature was still in revolt against the past ”

“ Charlotte's visit at Castle Wafer was to be extended, against the wish of Mrs. Darling, and might be continued for an indefinite time. Who knew but that Charlotte might captivate its bachelor master? And who knew but Charlotte herself was entertaining the same possibility? Mrs. Darling feared so; and, in all cases where Charlotte was concerned, she was a keen observer. What, though Isaac St. John had a hump upon his back, he was, apart from that, a lovable man--a man that even an attractive woman might covet for her own. ”

“ With a sniff of amusement Stanton collapsed again into his pillows. For almost an hour then he lay considering solemnly whether a red-headed girl could possibly be pretty. By two o'clock he had finally visualized quite a striking, Juno-esque type of beauty with a figure about the regal height of Cornelia's, and blue eyes perhaps just a trifle hazier and more mischievous. ”

“ There is pathos as well as humiliation in the thought that such a thing as a soul can be stunted by the trivialities of personal appearance, and it is a fact not beyond the reach of sympathy that each time Charlotte stood before her glass her ugliness spoke to her of failure, and goaded her to revenge.
It was a wet morning, but at half-past eleven o’clock the black horse was put into the phaeton, and Miss Mullen, attired in a shabby mackintosh, set out on her mission to Rosemount. ”

“ The morning had been spent by Charlotte and her retainers in stripping the straggling old bushes of the berries that resembled nothing so much as boot-buttons in size, colour and general consistency; the preserving pan had been borrowed, according to immemorial custom, from Miss Egan of the hotel, and at three o’clock of the afternoon the first relay was sluggishly seething and bubbling on the kitchen fire, and Charlotte, Norry, and Bid Sal were seated at the kitchen table snipping the brown tips of the shining fruit that still awaited its fate. ”

“ At the same moment an old man, who had been standing by the side of the road, leaning on his stick, turned towards the riders, and Francie recognised in him Charlotte’s retainer, Billy Grainy. His always bloodshot eyes were redder than ever, his mouth dribbled like a baby’s, and the smell of whisky poisoned the air all around him.
“I’m waitin’ on thim here this half-hour,” he began, in a loud drunken mumble, hobbling to Francie’s side, and moving along beside the mare, “as long as they were taking her back the road to cry her at her own gate. ”

“ The weak side of Charlotte’s nature was her ready abandonment of herself to fury that was, as often as not, wholly incompatible with its cause, and now that she had been dealt the hardest blow that life could give her, there were a few minutes in which rage, and hatred, and thwarted passion took her in their fierce hands, and made her for the time a wild beast. ”

“ But for them, Christopher could hardly have believed that this was the same being whom he had last seen on the sofa at Tally Ho, with the black gloves and the sal volatile.
“Oh yes, of course,” he said vaguely; “everyone has to undergo Mary Norris some time or other. If you are going back to Tally Ho now, I can drive you there.”
The invitation was lukewarm as it well could be, but had it been the most fervent in the world Charlotte had no intention of accepting it.
“No thank you, Mr. Dysart. I’m not done my marketing yet, but Francie’s at home and she’ll give you tea. Don’t wait for me. ”