“You’re raving!” cried Francie incredulously; “what on earth would make him turn you away?” She felt that her voice was sharp and unnatural, but she could not make it otherwise. The position was becoming momently more horrible from the weight of unknown catastrophe, the sight of her husband’s suffering and the struggle to sympathise with it, and the hollow disconnection between herself and everything about her.
“I can’t tell you—all in a minute,” he said with difficulty. “Wouldn’t you put your arm round my neck, Francie, as if you were sorry for me? You might be sorry for me, and for yourself too. We’re ruined. Oh my God!” he groaned, “we’re ruined!”
She put her arm round his neck, and pity, and a sense that it was expected of her, made her kiss his forehead. At the touch of her lips his sobs came suddenly and dreadfully, and his arms drew her convulsively to him. She lay there helpless and dry-eyed, enduring a wretchedness that in some ways was comparable to his own, but never becoming merged in the situation, never quite losing her sense of repulsion at his abasement.
“I never meant to touch a farthing of his—in the long run—” he went on, recovering himself a little; “I’d have paid him back every half-penny in the end—but, of course, he doesn’t believe that. What does he care what I say!”
“Did you borrow money from him, or what was it?” asked Francie gently.
“Yes, I did,” replied Lambert, setting his teeth; “but I didn’t tell him. I was eaten up with debts, and I had to—to borrow some of the estate money.” It was anguish to lower himself from the pedestal of riches and omnipotence on which he had always posed to her, and he spoke stumblingly. “It’s very hard to explain these things to you—it’s—it’s not so unusual as you’d think—and then, before I’d time to get things square again, some infernal mischief-maker has set him on to ask to see the books, and put him up to matters that he’d never have found out for himself.”
“Was he angry?” she asked, with the quietness that was so unlike her.
“Oh, I don’t know—I don’t care—” moving again restlessly in his chair; “he’s such a rotten, cold-blooded devil, you can’t tell what he’s at.” Even at this juncture it gave him pleasure to make little of Christopher to Francie. “He asked me the most beastly questions he could think of, in that d—d stammering way of his. He’s to write to me in two or three days, and I know well what he’ll say,” he went on with a stabbing sigh; “I suppose he’ll have it all over the country in a week’s time. He’s been to the bank and seen the estate account, and that’s what’s done me. I asked him plump and plain if he hadn’t been put up to it, and he didn’t deny it, but there’s no one could have known what was paid into that account but Baker or one of the clerks, and they knew nothing about the fines—I mean—they couldn’t understand enough to tell him anything. But what does it matter who told him. The thing’s done now, and I may as well give up.”
“What will you do?” said Francie faintly.
“If it wasn’t for you I think I’d put a bullet through my head,” he answered, his innately vulgar soul prompting him to express the best thought that was in him in conventional heroics, “but I couldn’t leave you, Francie—I couldn’t leave you—” he broke down again—“it was for our honeymoon I took the most of the money—” He could not go on, and her whole frame was shaken by his sobs.