“Why don’t ye writ her for the money?” said Charlotte, the spirit of her attorney grandfather gleaming in her eyes; “that’d frighten her!”
“I don’t want to do that if I can help it. I spoke to her about the lodge that Lady Dysart said she could have, and the old devil was fit to be tied; but we might get her to it before we’ve done with her.”
“If it was me I’d writ her now,” repeated Charlotte venomously; “you’ll find you’ll have to come to it in the end.”
“It’s a sin to see that lovely pasture going to waste,” said Lambert, leaning back and puffing at his pipe. “Peter Joyce hasn’t six head of cattle on it this minute.”
“If you and I had it, Roddy,” said Charlotte, eyeing him with a curious, guarded tenderness, “it wouldn’t be that way.”
Some vibration of the strong, incongruous tremor that passed through her as she spoke, reached Lambert’s indolent perception and startled it. It reminded him of the nebulous understanding that taking her money seemed to have involved him in; he believed he knew why she had given it to him, and though he knew also that he held his advantage upon precarious terms, even his coarse-fibred nature found something repellent in the thought of having to diplomatise with such affections as Charlotte’s.
“I was up at Murphy’s yesterday,” he said, as if his train of ideas had not been interrupted. “He has a grand filly there that I’d buy to-morrow if I had the money, or any place to put her. There’s a pot of money in her.”
“Well, if you’ll get me Gurthnamuckla,” said Charlotte with a laugh, in which nervousness was strangely apparent, “you may buy up every young horse in the country and stable them in the parlour, so long as you’ll leave the attics for me and the cats.”
Lambert turned his head upon its cushion, and looked at her.
“I think I’ll leave you a little more space than that, Charlotte, if ever we stable our horses together.”