Mr. Roderick Lambert’s study window gave upon the flower garden, and
consequently the high road also came within the sphere of his
observations. He had been sitting at his writing-table, since
luncheon-time, dealing with a variety of business, and seldom lifting
his glossy black head except when some sound in the road attracted his
attention. It was not his custom to work after a solid luncheon on a
close afternoon, nor was it by any means becoming to his complexion when
he did so; but the second post had brought letters of an unpleasant
character that required immediate attention, and the flush on his face
was not wholly due to hot beef-steak pie and sherry. It was not only
that several of Sir Benjamin’s tenants had attended a Land League
meeting the Sunday before, and that their religious director had written
to inform him that they had there pledged themselves to the Plan of
Campaign. That was annoying, but as the May rents were in he had no
objection to their amusing themselves as they pleased during the summer;
in fact, from a point of view on which Mr. Lambert dwelt as little as
possible even in his own mind, a certain amount of nominal disturbance
among the tenants might not come amiss. The thing that was really vexing
was the crass obstinacy of his wife’s trustees, who had acquainted him
with the fact that they were unable to comply with her wish that some of
her capital should be sold out.
It is probably hardly necessary to say that the worthy turkey hen had
expressed no such desire. A feeble, “to be sure, Roderick dear; I
daresay it’d be the best thing to do; but you know I don’t understand
such things,” had been her share of the transaction, and Mr. Lambert
knew that the refusal of her trustees to make the desired concession
would not ruffle so much as a feather; but he wished he could be as sure
of the equanimity of his coachbuilder, one of whose numerous demands for
payment was lying upon the table in front of him; while others, dating
back five years to the period of his marriage, lurked in the
pigeon-holes of his writing-table.
Mr. Lambert, like other young gentlemen of fashion, but not of fortune,
had thought that when he married a well-to-do widow, he ought to prove
his power of adjusting himself to circumstances by expending her ready
money in as distinguished a manner as possible. The end of the ready
money had come in an absurdly short time, and, paradoxical as it may
seem, it had during its brief life raised a flourishing following of
bills which had in the past spring given Mr. Lambert far more trouble
than he felt them to be worth, and though he had stopped the mouths of
some of the more rapacious of his creditors, he had done so with extreme
difficulty and at a cost that made him tremble. It was especially
provoking that the coachbuilder should have threatened legal proceedings
about that bill just now, when, in addition to other complications, he
happened to have lost more money at the Galway races than he cared to
think about, certainly more than he wished his wife and her relations to
know of.
Early in the afternoon he had, with an unregarding eye, seen Charlotte
drive by on her way to Gurthnamuckla; but after a couple of hours of
gloomy calculation and letter-writing, the realisation that Miss Mullen
was not at her house awoke in him, coupled with the idea that a little
fresh air would do him good. He went out of the house, some unconfessed
purpose quickening his step. He hesitated at the gate while it expanded
into determination, and then he hailed his wife, whose poppy-decked
garden-hat was painfully visible above the magenta blossoms of a
rhododendron bush.
“Lucy! I wouldn’t be surprised if I fetched Francie Fitzpatrick over for
tea. She’s by herself at Tally Ho. I saw Charlotte drive by without her
a little while ago.”
When he reached Tally Ho he found the gate open, an offence always
visited with extremest penalties by Miss Mullen, and as he walked up the
drive he noticed that, besides the broad wheel-tracks of the phaeton,
there were several thin and devious ones, at some places interrupted by
footmarks and a general appearance of a scuffle; at another heading into
a lilac bush with apparent precipitancy, and at the hall-door circling
endlessly and crookedly with several excursions on to the newly-mown
plot of grass.
“I wonder what perambulator has been running amuck in here? Charlotte
will make it hot for them, whoever they were,” thought Lambert, as he
stood waiting for the door to be opened, and watched through the glass
of the porch-door two sleek tortoise-shell cats lapping a saucer of
yellow cream in a corner of the hall. “By Jove! how snug she is in this
little place. She must have a pot of money put by; more than she’d ever
own up to, I’ll engage!”
At this juncture the door opened, and he was confronted by Norry the
Boat, with sleeves rolled above her brown elbows, and stockinged feet
untrammelled by boots.
“There’s noan of them within,” she announced before he had time to
speak. “Miss Charlotte’s gone dhriving to Gurthnamuckla, and Miss
Francie went out a while ago.”
“Which way did she go, d’ye know?”
“Musha, faith! I do _not_ know what way did she go,” replied Norry, her
usual asperity heightened by a recent chase of Susan, who had fled to
the roof of the turf-house with a mackerel snatched from the
kitchen-table. “I have plinty to do besides running afther her. I heard
her spakin’ to one outside in the avenue, and with that she clapped the
hall-doore afther her and she didn’t come in since.”
Lambert thought it wiser not to venture on the suggestion that Louisa
might be better informed, and walked away down the avenue trying hard
not to admit to himself his disappointment.
He turned towards home again in an objectless way, thoroughly thwarted,
and dismally conscious that the afternoon contained for him only the
prospect of having tea with his wife and finishing his letters
afterwards. His step became slower and slower as he approached his own
entrance gates, and he looked at his watch.
“Confound it! it’s only half-past four. I can’t go in yet;” then, a new
idea striking him, “perhaps she went out to meet Charlotte. I declare I
might as well go a bit down the road and see if they’re coming back
yet.”
He walked for at least half a mile under the trees, whose young June
leaves had already a dissipated powdering of white limestone dust,
without meeting anything except a donkey with a pair of creaking
panniers on its back, walking alone and discreetly at its own side of
the road, as well aware as Mr. Lambert that its owner was dallying with
a quart of porter at a roadside public house a mile away. The turn to
Gurthnamuckla was not far off when the distant rumble of wheels became
at last audible; Lambert had only time to remember angrily that, as the
Tally Ho phaeton had but two seats, he had had his walk for nothing,
when the bowed head and long melancholy face of the black horse came in
sight, and he became aware that Charlotte was without a companion.
Her face had more colour in it than usual as she pulled up beside him,
perhaps from the heat of the afternoon and the no small exertion of
flogging her steed, and her manner when she spoke was neither bluff nor
hearty, but approximated more nearly to that of ordinary womankind than
was its wont. Mr. Lambert noticed none of these things; and, being a
person whose breeding was not always equal to annoying emergencies, he
did not trouble himself to take off his hat or smile appropriately as
Charlotte said--
“Well, Roddy, I’d as soon expect to see your two horses sitting in the
dog-cart driving you as to see you as far from home as this on your own
legs. Where are you off to?”
“I was taking a stroll out to meet you, and ask you to come back and
have tea with Lucy,” replied Mr. Lambert, recognising the decree of fate
with a singularly bad grace. “I went down to Tally Ho to ask you, and
Norry told me you had gone to Gurthnamuckla.”
“Did you see Francie there?” said Charlotte quickly.
“No; I believe she was out somewhere.”
“Well, you were a very good man to take so much trouble about us,” she
replied, looking at him with an expression that softened the lines of
her face in a surprising way. “Are you too proud to have a lift home
now?”
“Thank you, I’d sooner walk--and--” casting about for an excuse--“you
mightn’t like the smell of my cigar under your nose.”
“Come, now, Roddy,” exclaimed Charlotte, “you ought to know me better
than that! Don’t you remember how you used to sit smoking beside me in
the office when I was helping you to do your work? In fact, I wouldn’t
say that there hadn’t been an occasion when I was guilty of a cigarette
in your company myself!”
She turned her eyes towards him, and the provocative look in them came
as instinctively and as straight as ever it did from Francie’s, or as
ever it has been projected from the curbed heart of woman. But, unfair
as it may be, it is certain that if Lambert had seen it, he would not
have been attracted by it. He, however, did not look up.
“Well, if you don’t mind going slow, I’ll walk beside you,” he said,
ignoring the reminiscence. “I want to know whether you did better
business with Julia Duffy than I did last week.”
The soft look was gone in a moment from Charlotte’s face.
“I couldn’t get much satisfaction out of her,” she replied; “but I think
I left a thorn in her pillow when I told her Peter Joyce was bankrupt.”
“I’ll take my oath you did,” said Lambert, with a short laugh. “I
declare I’d be sorry for the poor old devil if she wasn’t such a bad
tenant, letting the whole place go to the mischief, house and all.”
“I tell you the house isn’t in such a bad way as you think; it’s dirt
ails it more than anything else.” Charlotte had recovered her wonted
energy of utterance. “Believe me, if I had a few workmen in that house
for a month you wouldn’t know it.”
“Well, I believe you will, sooner or later. All the same, I can’t see
what the deuce you want with it. Now, if _I_ had the place, I’d make a
pot of money out of it, keeping young horses there, as I’ve often told
you. I’d do a bit of coping, and making hunters to sell. There’s no work
on earth I’d like as well.”
He took a long pull at his cigar, and expelled a sigh and a puff of
smoke.
“Well, Roddy,” said Charlotte, after a moment’s pause, speaking with an
unusual slowness and almost hesitancy, “you know I wouldn’t like to come
between you and your fancy. If you want the farm, in God’s name take it
yourself!”
“Take it myself! I haven’t the money to pay the fine, much less to stock
it. I tell you what, Charlotte,” he went on, turning round and putting
his hand on the splash-board of the phaeton as he walked, “you and I are
old pals, and I don’t mind telling you it’s the most I can do to keep
going the way I am now. I never was so driven for money in my life,” he
ended, some vague purpose, added to the habit of an earlier part of his
life, pushing him on to be confidential.
“Who’s driving you, Roddy?” said Charlotte, in a voice in which a less
preoccupied person than her companion might have noticed a curiously
gentle inflection.
It is perhaps noteworthy that while Mr. Lambert’s lips replied with
heartfelt irritation, “Oh, they’re all at me, Langford the coachbuilder,
and everyone of them,” one section of his brain was asking the other how
much ready money old Mrs. Mullen had had to leave, and was receiving a
satisfactory answer.
There was a pause in the conversation. It was so long now since the
black horse had felt the whip, that, acting on the presumption that his
mistress had fallen asleep, he fell into an even more slumbrous crawl
without any notice being taken.
“Roddy,” said Charlotte at last, and Lambert now observed how low and
rough her voice was, “do you remember in old times once or twice, when
you were put to it for a five-pound note, you made no bones about asking
a friend to help you? Well, you know I’m a poor woman”--even at this
moment Charlotte’s caution asserted itself--“but I daresay I could put
my hand on a couple of hundred, and if they’d be any use to you--”
Lambert became very red. The possibility of some such a climax as this
had floated in a sub-current of thought just below the level of formed
ideas, but now that it had come, it startled him. It was an unheard-of
thing that Charlotte should make such an offer as this. It gave him
suddenly a tingling sense of power, and at the same time a strange
instinct of disgust and shame.
“Oh, my dear Charlotte,” he began awkwardly, “upon my soul you’re a
great deal too good. I never thought of such a thing--I--I--” he
stammered, wishing he could refuse, but casting about for words in which
to accept.
“Ah, nonsense. Now, Roddy, me dear boy,” interrupted Charlotte,
regaining her usual manner as she saw his embarrassment, “say no more
about it. We’ll consider it a settled thing, and we’ll go through the
base business details after tea.”
Lambert said to himself that there was really no way out of it. If she
was so determined the only thing was to let her do as she liked; no one
could say that the affair was of his seeking.
“And, you know,” continued Charlotte in her most jocular voice, before
he could frame a sentence of the right sort, “who knows, if I get the
farm, that we mightn’t make a joint-stock business out of it, and have
young horses there, and all the rest of it!”
“You’re awfully good, Charlotte,” said Lambert, with an emotion in his
voice that she did not guess to be purely the result of inward relief
and exultation; “I’m awfully obliged to you--you always were a--a true
friend--some day, perhaps, I’ll be able to show you what I think about
it,” he stammered, unable to think of anything else to say, and, lifting
his hand from the splash-board, he put it on hers, that lay in her lap
with the reins in it, and pressed it for a moment. Into both their minds
shot simultaneously the remembrance of a somewhat similar scene, when,
long ago, Charlotte had come to the help of her father’s pupil, and he
had expressed his gratitude in a more ardent manner--a manner that had
seemed cheap enough to him at the time, but that had been more costly to
Charlotte than any other thing that had ever befallen her.
“You haven’t forgotten old times any more than I have,” he went on,
knowing very well that he was taking now much the same simple and
tempting method of getting rid of his obligation that he had once found
so efficacious, and to a certain extent enjoying the thought that he
could still make a fool of her. “Ah, well!” he sighed, “there’s no use
trying to get those times back, any more than there is in trying to
forget them.” He hesitated. “But, after all, there’s many a new tune
played on an old fiddle! Isn’t that so?” He was almost frightened at his
own daring as he saw Charlotte’s cheek burn with a furious red, and her
lips quiver in the attempt to answer.
Upon their silence there broke from the distance a loud scream, then
another, and then a burst of laughter in a duet of soprano and bass,
coming apparently from a lane that led into the road a little further
on--a smooth and secluded little lane, bordered thickly with hazel
bushes--a private road, in fact, to a model farm that Mr. Lambert had
established on his employer’s property. From the mouth of this there
broke suddenly a whirling vision of whiteness and wheels, and Miss
Fitzpatrick, mounted on a tricycle and shrieking loudly, dashed across
the high road and collapsed in a heap in the ditch. Lambert started
forward, but long before he could reach her the Rev. Joseph Corkran
emerged at full speed from the lane, hatless, with long flying
coat-tails, and, with a skill born of experience, extricated Francie
from her difficulties.
“Oh, I’m dead!” she panted. “Oh, the horrible thing! What good were you
that you let it go?” unworthily attacking the equally exhausted Corkran.
Then, in tones of consternation, “Goodness! Look at Mr. Lambert and
Charlotte! Oh, Mr. Lambert,” as Lambert came up to her, “did you see the
toss I got? The dirty thing ran away with me down the hill, and Mr.
Corkran was so tired running he had to let go, and I declare I thought I
was killed--and you don’t look a bit sorry for me!”
“Well, what business had you to get up on a thing like that?” answered
Lambert, looking angrily at the curate. “I wonder, Corkran, you hadn’t
more sense than to let a lady ride that machine.”
“Well, indeed, Mr. Lambert, I told Miss Fitzpatrick it wasn’t as easy as
she thought,” replied the guilty Corkran, a callow youth from Trinity
College, Dublin, who had been as wax in Francie’s hands, and who now
saw, with unfeigned terror, the approach of Charlotte. “I begged of her
not to go outside Tally Ho, but--but--I think I’d better go back and
look for my hat”--he ended abruptly, retreating into the lane just as
Charlotte drew up the black horse and opened her mouth to deliver
herself of her indignation.