“Charlotte,” he said, looking down at her with eyes that self-pity and shaken self-control were moistening again, “I’m in most terrible trouble. Will you help me?”
“Wait till I hear what it is and I’ll tell you that,” replied Charlotte, with the same peculiar, flushed look on her face, and suggestion in her voice of strong and latent feeling. He could not tell how it was, but he felt as if she knew what he was going to say.
“I’m four hundred pounds in debt to the estate, and Dysart has found it out,” he said, lowering his voice as if afraid that the spiders and wood-lice might repeat his secret.
“Four hundred,” thought Charlotte; “that’s more than I reckoned;” but she said aloud, “My God! Roddy, how did that happen?”
“I declare to you I don’t know how it happened. One thing and another came against me, and I had to borrow this money, and before I could pay it he found out.”
Lambert was a pitiable figure as he made his confession, his head, his shoulders, and even his moustache drooping limply, and his hands nervously twisting his ash plant.
“That’s a bad business,” said Charlotte reflectively, and was silent for a moment, while Lambert realised the satisfaction of dealing with an intelligence that could take in such a situation instantaneously, without alarm or even surprise.
“Is he going to give you the sack?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet. He didn’t say anything definite.”
Lambert found the question hard to bear, but he endured it for the sake of the chance it gave him to lead up to the main point of the interview. “If I could have that four hundred placed to his credit before I see him next, I believe there’d be an end of it. Not that I’d stay with him,” he went on, trying to bluster, “or with any man that treated me this kind of way, going behind my back to look at the accounts.”