The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [39]
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 paniers 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