The floor of the potato loft at Gurthnamuckla had for a long time needed
repairs, a circumstance not in itself distressing to Miss Mullen, who
held that effort after mere theoretical symmetry was unjustifiable waste
of time in either housekeeping or farming. On this first of June,
however, an intimation from Norry that “there’s ne’er a pratie ye have
that isn’t ate with the rats,” given with the thinly-veiled triumph of
servants in such announcements, caused a truculent visit of inspection
to the potato loft; and in her first spare moment of the afternoon, Miss
Mullen set forth with her tool-basket, and some boards from a
packing-case, to make good the breaches with her own hands. Doing it
herself saved the necessity of taking the men from their work, and
moreover ensured its being properly done.
So she thought, as, having climbed the ladder that led from the cowhouse
to the loft, she put her tools on the ground, and surveyed with a
workman’s eye the job she had set herself. The loft was hot and airless,
redolent of the cowhouse below, as well as of the clayey mustiness of
the potatoes that were sprouting in the dirt on the floor, and even
sending pallid, worm-like roots down into space through the cracks in
the boards. Miss Mullen propped the window-shutter open with the
largest potato, and, pinning up her skirt, fell to work.
She had been hammering and sawing for a quarter of an hour when she
heard the clatter of a horse’s hoofs on the cobble-stones of the yard,
and, getting up from her knees, advanced to the window with caution and
looked out. It was Mr. Lambert, in the act of pulling up his awkward
young horse, and she stood looking down at him in silence while he
dismounted, with a remarkable expression on her face, one in which some
acute mental process was mixed with the half-unconscious and yet
all-observant recognition of an intensely familiar object.
“Hullo, Roddy!” she called out at last, “is that you? What brings you
over so early?”
Mr. Lambert started with more violence than the occasion seemed to
demand.
“Hullo!” he replied, in a voice not like his own, “is that where you
are?”
“Yes, and it’s where I’m going to stay. This is the kind of fancy work
I’m at,” brandishing her saw; “so if you want to talk to me you must
come up here.”
“All right,” said Lambert, gloomily, “I’ll come up as soon as I put the
colt in the stable.”
It is a fact so improbable as to be worth noting, that before Lambert
found his way up the ladder, Miss Mullen had unpinned her skirt and
fastened up the end of a plait that had escaped from the massive coils
at the back of her head.
“Well, and where’s the woman that owns you?” she asked, beginning to
work again, while her visitor stood in obvious discomfort, with his head
touching the rafters, and the light from the low window striking sharply
up against his red and heavy eyes.
“At home,” he replied, almost vacantly. “I’d have been here half an hour
ago or more,” he went on after a moment or two, “but the colt cast a
shoe, and I had to go on to the forge beyond the cross to get it put
on.”
Charlotte, with a flat pencil in her mouth, grunted responsively, while
she measured off a piece of board, and, holding it with her knee on the
body of a legless wheelbarrow, began to saw it across. Lambert looked
on, provoked and disconcerted by this engrossing industry. With his
brimming sense of collapse and crisis, he felt that even this temporary
delay of sympathy was an unkindness.
“That colt must be sold this week, so I couldn’t afford to knock his
hoof to bits on the hard road.” His manner was so portentous that
Charlotte looked up again, and permitted herself to remark on what had
been apparent to her the moment she saw him.
“Why, what’s the matter with you, Roddy? Now I come to see you, you look
as if you’d been at your own funeral.”
“I wish to God I had! It would be the best thing could happen me.”
He found pleasure in saying something to startle her, and in seeing that
her face became a shade hotter than the stifling air and the stooping
over her work had made it.
“What makes you talk like that?” she said, a little strangely, as it
seemed to him.
He thought she was moved, and he immediately felt his position to be
more pathetic than he had believed. It would be much easier to explain
the matter to Charlotte than to Francie, he felt at once; Charlotte
understood business matters, a formula which conveyed to his mind much
comfortable flexibility in money affairs.
“Charlotte,” he said, looking down at her with eyes that self-pity and
shaken self-control were moistening again, “I’m in most terrible
trouble. Will you help me?”
“Wait till I hear what it is and I’ll tell you that,” replied Charlotte,
with the same peculiar, flushed look on her face, and suggestion in her
voice of strong and latent feeling. He could not tell how it was, but he
felt as if she knew what he was going to say.
“I’m four hundred pounds in debt to the estate, and Dysart has found it
out,” he said, lowering his voice as if afraid that the spiders and
wood-lice might repeat his secret.
“Four hundred,” thought Charlotte; “that’s more than I reckoned;” but
she said aloud, “My God! Roddy, how did that happen?”
“I declare to you I don’t know how it happened. One thing and another
came against me, and I had to borrow this money, and before I could pay
it he found out.”
Lambert was a pitiable figure as he made his confession, his head, his
shoulders, and even his moustache drooping limply, and his hands
nervously twisting his ash plant.
“That’s a bad business,” said Charlotte reflectively, and was silent for
a moment, while Lambert realised the satisfaction of dealing with an
intelligence that could take in such a situation instantaneously,
without alarm or even surprise.
“Is he going to give you the sack?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet. He didn’t say anything definite.”
Lambert found the question hard to bear, but he endured it for the sake
of the chance it gave him to lead up to the main point of the interview.
“If I could have that four hundred placed to his credit before I see him
next, I believe there’d be an end of it. Not that I’d stay with him,” he
went on, trying to bluster, “or with any man that treated me this kind
of way, going behind my back to look at the accounts.”
“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?”
Even 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 for support,
turned from him and hid her face in her cloak.
FINIS.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, ABERDEEN