“Is that the way he found you out?” asked Charlotte, taking up the lid of the packing case and twisting a nail out of it with her hammer, “he must be smarter than you took him for.”
“Someone must have put him up to it,” said Lambert, “someone who’d got at the books. It beats me to make it out. But what’s the good of thinking of that. The thing that’s setting me mad is to know how to pay him.” He waited to see if Charlotte would speak, but she was occupied in straightening the nail against the wall with her hammer, and he went on with a dry throat. “I’m going to sell all my horses, Charlotte, and I daresay I can raise some money on the furniture; but it’s no easy job to raise money in such a hurry as this, and if I’m to be saved from being disgraced, I ought to have it at once to stop his mouth. I believe if I could pay him at once he wouldn’t have spunk enough to go any further with the thing.” He waited again, but the friend of his youth continued silent. “Charlotte, no man ever had a better friend, through thick and thin, than I’ve had in you. There’s no other person living that I’d put myself under an obligation to but yourself. Charlotte, for the sake of all that’s ever been between us, would you lend me the money?”
Her face was hidden from him as she knelt, and he stooped and placed a clinging, affectionate hand upon her shoulder. Miss Mullen got up abruptly, and Lambert’s hand fell.
“All that’s ever been between us is certainly a very weighty argument, Roddy,” she said with a smile that deepened the ugly lines about her mouth, and gave Lambert a chilly qualm. “There’s a matter of three hundred pounds between us, if that’s what you mean.”
“I know, Charlotte,” he said hastily. “No one remembers that better than I do. But this is a different kind of thing altogether. I’d give you a bill of sale on everything at Rosemount—and there are the horses out here too. Of course, I suppose I might be able to raise the money at the bank or somewhere, but it’s a very different thing to deal with a friend, and a friend who can hold her tongue too. You never failed me yet, Charlotte, old girl, and I don’t believe you’ll do it now!”
His handsome, dark eyes were bent upon her face with all the pathos he was master of, and he was glad to feel tears rising in them.
“Well, I’m afraid that’s just what I’ll have to do,” she said, flinging away the nail that she had tried to straighten, and fumbling in her pocket for another, “I may be able to hold my tongue, but I don’t hold with throwing good money after bad.”
Lambert stood quite still, staring at her, trying to believe that this was the Charlotte who had trembled when he kissed her, whose love for him had made her his useful and faithful thrall.
“Do you mean to say that you’ll see me ruined and disgraced sooner than put out your hand to help me?” he said passionately.
“I thought you said you could get the money somewhere else,” she replied, with undisturbed coolness, “and you might know that coming to me for money is like going to the goat’s house for wool. I’ve got nothing more to lend, and no one ought to know that better than yourself!”
Charlotte was standing, yellow-faced and insolent, opposite to Lambert, with her hands in the pockets of her apron; in every way a contrast to him, with his flushed forehead and suffused eyes. The dull, white light that struck up into the roof from the whitewashed kitchen wall, showed Lambert the furrowed paths of implacability in his adversary’s face, as plainly as it showed her his defeat and desperation.
“You’ve got no more money to lend, d’ye say?” he repeated, with a laugh that showed he had courage enough left to lose his temper; “I suppose you’ve got all the money you got eighteen months ago from the old lady lent out! ‘Pon my word, considering you got Francie’s share of it for yourself, I think it would have been civiller to have given her husband the first refusal of a loan! I daresay I’d have given you as good interest as your friends in Ferry Lane!”
Charlotte’s eyes suddenly lost their exaggerated indifference.
“And if she ever had the smallest claim to what ye call a share!” she vociferated, “haven’t you had it twenty times over? Was there ever a time that ye came cringing and crawling to me for money that I refused it to ye? And how do you thank me? By embezzling the money I paid for the land, and then coming to try and get it out of me over again, because Sir Christopher Dysart is taught sense to look into his own affairs, and see how his agent is cheating him!”
Some quality of triumph in her tone, some light of previous knowledge in her eye, struck Lambert.
“Was it you told him?” he said hoarsely, “was it you spoke to Dysart?”
Every now and then in the conduct of her affairs, Miss Mullen permitted the gratification of her temper to take the place of the slower pleasure of secrecy.
“Yes, I told him,” she answered, without hesitation.
“You went to Dysart, and set him on to ruin me!” said Lambert, in a voice that had nearly as much horror as rage in it.
“And may I ask you what you’ve ever done for me?” she said, gripping her hammer with a strong, trembling hand, “that I was to keep your tricks from being found out for you? What reason was there in God’s earth that I wasn’t to do my plain duty by those that are older friends than you?”
“What reason!” Lambert almost choked from the intolerable audacity and heartlessness of the question. “Are you in your right mind to ask me that? You, that’s been like a—a near relation to me all these years, or pretending to be! There was a time you wouldn’t have done this to me, you know it damned well, and so do I. You were glad enough to do anything for me then, so long as I’d be as much as civil to you, and now, I suppose, this is your dirty devilish spite, because you were cut out by someone else!”
She did not flinch as the words went through and through her.
“Take care of yourself!” she said, grinning at him, “perhaps you’re not the one to talk about being cut out! Oh, I don’t think ye need look as if ye didn’t understand me. At all events, all ye have to do is to go home and ask your servants—or, for the matter of that, anyone in the streets of Lismoyle —who it is that’s cut ye out, and made ye the laughing-stock of the country?”
She put her hand on the dusty beam beside her, giddy with her gratified impulse, as she saw him take the blow and wither under it.
She scarcely heard at first the strange and sudden sound of commotion that had sprung up like a wind in the house opposite. The windows were all open, and through them came the sound of banging doors and running footsteps, and then Norry’s voice screaming something as she rushed from room to room. She was in the kitchen now, and the words came gasping and sobbing through the open door.
“Where’s Miss Charlotte? Where is she? O God! O God! Where is she? Miss Francie’s killed, her neck’s broke below on the road! O God of Heaven help us!”
Neither Charlotte nor Lambert heard clearly what she said, but the shapeless terror of calamity came about them like a vapour and blanched the hatred in their faces. In a moment they were together at the window, and at the same instant Norry burst out into the yard, with outflung arms and grey hair streaming. As she saw Lambert, her strength seemed to go from her. She staggered back, and, catching at the door-post for support, turned from him and hid her face in her cloak.
FINIS.
The Real Charlotte Page 45