“They look like money, Charlotte, I think. That brown filly ought to bring a hundred at least next Ballinasloe fair, when she knows how to jump,” said Lambert, as he and Charlotte walked across the field, leaving Francie, who saw no reason for pretending an interest that was not expected of her, to amuse herself by picking cowslips near the gate.
“I’m glad to hear you say that, Roddy,” replied Charlotte. “It’s a comfort to think anything looks like money these bad times; I’ve never known prices so low.”
“They’re lower than I ever thought they’d go, by Jove,” Lambert answered gloomily. “I’m going up to Mayo, collecting, next week, and if I don’t do better there than I’ve done here, I daresay Dysart won’t think so much of his father’s shoes after all.”
He was striding along, taking no trouble to suit his pace to Charlotte’s, and perhaps the indifference to her companionship that it showed, as well as the effort involved in keeping beside him, had the effect of irritating her.
“Maybe he might think them good enough to kick people out with,” she said with a disagreeable laugh; “I remember, in the good old times, when my father and Sir Benjamin ruled the roast, we heard very little about bad collections.”
It struck Lambert that though this was the obvious moment for that business talk that he had come over for, it was not a propitious one. “I wonder if the macaroni cheese disagreed with her?” he thought; “it was beastly enough to do it, anyhow. You may remember,” he said aloud, “that in the good old times the property was worth just about double what it is now, and a matter of three or four hundred pounds either way made no difference to signify.”
“D’ye think ye’ll be that much short this time?”
She darted the question at him with such keenness that Lambert inwardly recoiled before it, though it was the point to which he had wished to bring her.
“Oh, of course one can’t be sure,” he said, retreating from his position; “but I’ve just got a sort of general idea that I’ll be a bit under the mark this time.”
He was instinctively afraid of Charlotte, but in this moment he knew, perhaps for the first time, how much afraid. In theory he believed in his old power over her, and clung to the belief with the fatuity of a vain man, but he had always been uncomfortably aware that she was intellectually his master, and though he thought he could still sway her heart with a caress, he knew he could never outwit her.