“Take it myself! I haven’t the money to pay the fine, much less to stock it. I tell you what, Charlotte,” he went on, turning round and putting his hand on the splash-board of the phaeton as he walked, “you and I are old pals, and I don’t mind telling you it’s the most I can do to keep going the way I am now. I never was so driven for money in my life,” he ended, some vague purpose, added to the habit of an earlier part of his life, pushing him on to be confidential.
“Who’s driving you, Roddy?” said Charlotte, in a voice in which a less preoccupied person than her companion might have noticed a curiously gentle inflection.
It is perhaps noteworthy that while Mr. Lambert’s lips replied with heartfelt irritation, “Oh, they’re all at me, Langford the coachbuilder, and everyone of them,” one section of his brain was asking the other how much ready money old Mrs. Mullen had had to leave, and was receiving a satisfactory answer.
There was a pause in the conversation. It was so long now since the black horse had felt the whip, that, acting on the presumption that his mistress had fallen asleep, he fell into an even more slumbrous crawl without any notice being taken.
“Roddy,” said Charlotte at last, and Lambert now observed how low and rough her voice was, “do you remember in old times once or twice, when you were put to it for a five-pound note, you made no bones about asking a friend to help you? Well, you know I’m a poor woman”—even at this moment Charlotte’s caution asserted itself—“but I daresay I could put my hand on a couple of hundred, and if they’d be any use to you—”
Lambert became very red. The possibility of some such a climax as this had floated in a sub-current of thought just below the level of formed ideas, but now that it had come, it startled him. It was an unheard-of thing that Charlotte should make such an offer as this. It gave him suddenly a tingling sense of power, and at the same time a strange instinct of disgust and shame.
“Oh, my dear Charlotte,” he began awkwardly, “upon my soul you’re a great deal too good. I never thought of such a thing—I—I—” he stammered, wishing he could refuse, but casting about for words in which to accept.
“Ah, nonsense. Now, Roddy, me dear boy,” interrupted Charlotte, regaining her usual manner as she saw his embarrassment, “say no more about it. We’ll consider it a settled thing, and we’ll go through the base business details after tea.”
Lambert said to himself that there was really no way out of it. If she was so determined the only thing was to let her do as she liked; no one could say that the affair was of his seeking.
“And, you know,” continued Charlotte in her most jocular voice, before he could frame a sentence of the right sort, “who knows, if I get the farm, that we mightn’t make a joint-stock business out of it, and have young horses there, and all the rest of it!”