The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [200]
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