“Yes, I did,” answered Mr. Lambert, turning his horse as he spoke; “I had business that took me up to town yesterday, so it just happened that I hit off Francie. Well, good evening. I expect Lucy will be calling round to see you to-morrow or next day.”
He walked his horse down the drive, and as he passed Francie returning with her hat he leaned over the wheel and said something to her that made her shake her head and laugh. Miss Charlotte was too far off to hear what it was.
CHAPTER V.
It was generally felt in Lismoyle that Mr. Roderick Lambert held an unassailable position in society. The Dysart agency had always been considered to confer brevet rank as a country gentleman upon its owner, apart even from the intimacy with the Dysarts which it implied; and as, in addition to these advantages, Mr. Lambert possessed good looks, a wife with money, and a new house at least a mile from the town, built under his own directions and at his employer’s expense, Lismoyle placed him unhesitatingly at the head of its visiting list. Of course his wife was placed there too, but somehow or other Mrs. Lambert was a person of far less consequence than her husband. She had had the money certainly, but that quality was a good deal overlooked by the Lismoyle people in their admiration for the manner in which her husband spent it. It was natural that they should respect the captor rather than the captive, and, in any case, Mr. Roderick Lambert’s horses and traps were more impressive facts than the Maltese terrier and the shelf of patent medicines that were Mrs. Lambert’s only extravagances.
Possibly, also, the fact that she had no children placed her at a disadvantage with the matrons of Lismoyle, all of whom could have spoken fearlessly with their enemies in the gate; it deprived conversation with her of the antiphonal quality, when mother answers unto mother of vaccination and teething-rash and the sins of the nursery-maids are visited upon the company generally.
“Ah, she’s a poor peenie-weenie thing!” said Mrs. Baker, who was usually the mouthpiece of Lismoyle opinion, “and it’s no wonder that Lambert’s for ever flourishing about the country in his dog-trap, and she never seeing a sight of him from morning till night. I’d like to see Mr. Baker getting up on a horse and galloping around the roads after bank hours, instead of coming in for his cup of tea with me and the girls!”
Altogether the feeling was that Mrs. Lambert was a failure, and in spite of her undoubted amiability, and the creditable fact that Mr. Lambert was the second husband that the eight thousand pounds ground out by her late father’s mills had procured for her, her spouse was regarded with a certain regretful pity as the victim of circumstance.
In spite of his claims upon the sympathy of Lismoyle, Mr. Lambert looked remarkably well able to compete with his lot in life, as he sat smoking his pipe in his dinner costume of carpet slippers and oldest shooting coat, a couple of evenings after Francie’s arrival. As a rule the Lamberts preferred to sit in their dining-room. The hard magnificence of the blue rep chairs in the drawing-room appealed to them from different points of view; Mrs. Lambert holding that they were too good to be used except by “company,” while Mr. Lambert truly felt that no one who was not debarred by politeness from the power of complaint would voluntarily sit upon them. An unshaded lamp was on the table, its ugly glare conflicting with the soft remnants of June twilight that stole in between the half-drawn curtains; a tumbler of whisky and water stood on the corner of the table beside the comfortable leather-covered armchair in which the master of the house was reading his paper, while opposite to him, in a basket chair, his wife was conscientiously doing her fancy work. She was a short woman with confused brown eyes and distressingly sloping shoulders; a woman of the turkey hen type, dejected and timorous in voice, and an habitual wearer of porous plasters. Her toilet for the evening consisted in replacing by a white cashmere shawl the red knitted one which she habitually wore, and a languid untidiness in the pale brown hair that hung over her eyes intimated that she had tried to curl her fringe for dinner.
Neither were speaking; it seemed as if Mr Lambert were placidly awaiting the arrival of his usual after-dinner sleep; the Maltese terrier was already snoring plethorically on his mistress’s lap, in a manner quite disproportioned to his size, and Mrs. Lambert’s crochet needles were moving more and more slowly through the mazes of the “bosom friend” that she was making for herself, the knowledge that the minute hand of the black marble clock was approaching the hour at which she took her postprandial pill alone keeping her from also yielding to the soft influences of a substantial meal. At length she took the box from the little table beside her, where it stood between a bottle of smelling-salts and a lump of camphor, and having sat with it in her hand till the half hour was solemnly boomed from the chimneypiece, swallowed her pill with practised ease. At the slight noise of replacing the box, her husband opened his eyes.
“By the way, Lucy,” he said in a voice that had no trace of drowsiness in it, “did Charlotte Mullen say what she was going to do to-morrow?”