“Is that the way he found you out?” asked Charlotte, taking up the lid of the packing-case and twisting a nail out of it with her hammer. “He must be smarter than you took him for.”
“Someone must have put him up to it,” said Lambert, “someone who’d got at the books. It beats me to make it out. But what’s the good of thinking of that? The thing that’s setting me mad is to know how to pay him.” He waited to see if Charlotte would speak, but she was occupied in straightening the nail against the wall with her hammer, and he went on with a dry throat. “I’m going to sell all my horses, Charlotte, and I daresay I can raise some money on the furniture; but it’s no easy job to raise money in such a hurry as this, and if I’m to be saved from being disgraced, I ought to have it at once to stop his mouth. I believe if I could pay him at once he wouldn’t have spunk enough to go any further with the thing.” He waited again, but the friend of his youth continued silent. “Charlotte, no man ever had a better friend, through thick and thin, than I’ve had in you. There’s no other person living that I’d put myself under an obligation to but yourself. Charlotte, for the sake of all that’s ever been between us, would you lend me the money?”
Her face was hidden from him as she knelt, and he stooped and placed a clinging, affectionate hand upon her shoulder. Miss Mullen got up abruptly, and Lambert’s hand fell.
“All that’s ever been between us is certainly a very weighty argument, Roddy,” she said with a smile that deepened the ugly lines about her mouth, and gave Lambert a chilly qualm. “There’s a matter of three hundred pounds between us, if that’s what you mean.”
“I know, Charlotte,” he said hastily. “No one remembers that better than I do. But this is a different kind of thing altogether. I’d give you a bill of sale on everything at Rosemount—and there are the horses out here too. Of course, I suppose I might be able to raise the money at the bank or somewhere, but it’s a very different thing to deal with a friend, and a friend who can hold her tongue too. You never failed me yet, Charlotte, old girl, and I don’t believe you’ll do it now!”
His handsome, dark eyes were bent upon her face with all the pathos he was master of, and he was glad to feel tears rising in them.
“Well, I’m afraid that’s just what I’ll have to do,” she said, flinging away the nail that she had tried to straighten, and fumbling in her pocket for another; “I may be able to hold my tongue, but I don’t hold with throwing good money after bad.”
Lambert stood quite still, staring at her, trying to believe that this was the Charlotte who had trembled when he kissed her, whose love for him had made her his useful and faithful thrall.
“Do you mean to say that you’ll see me ruined and disgraced sooner than put out your hand to help me?” he said passionately.
“I thought you said you could get the money somewhere else,” she replied, with undisturbed coolness, “and you might know that coming to me for money is like going to the goat’s house for wool. I’ve got nothing more to lend, and no one ought to know that better than yourself!”