The Real Charlotte Part 23

Charlotte interrupted him with more violence than she had as yet permitted to escape.

"If you want to know more, I can tell you more, and plenty more! For the last year and more, Roddy Lambert's been lashing out large sums of ready money beyond his income, and I know his income to the penny and the farthing! Where did he get that money from? I ask you. What paid for his young horses, and his new dog-cart, and his new carpets, yes! and his honeymoon trip to Paris? I ask you what paid for all that? It wasn't his first wife's money paid for it, I know that for a fact, and it certainly wasn't the second wife's!"

She was losing hold of herself; her gestures were of the sort that she usually reserved for her inferiors, and the corners of her mouth bubbled like a snail. Christopher looked at her, and began to walk away. Charlotte followed him, walking unsteadily on the loose stones, and inwardly cursing his insolence as well as her own forgetfulness of the method she had laid down for the interview. He turned and waited for her when he reached the path, and had time to despise himself for not being able to conceal his feelings from a woman so abhorrent and so contemptible.

"I am-er-obliged for your information," he said stiffly. In spite of his scorn for his own prejudice, he would not gratify her by saying more.

"You will forgive me, Sir Christopher," replied Charlotte with an astonishing resumption of dignity, "if I say that that is a point that is quite immaterial to me. I require no thanks. I felt it to be my duty to tell you these painful facts, and what I suffer in doing it concerns only myself."

They walked on in silence between the lake and the wood, with the bluebells creeping outwards to their feet through the white beech stems, and as the last turn of the path brought them in sight of Francie and Hawkins, Charlotte spoke again: "You'll remember that all this is in strict confidence, Sir Christopher."

"I shall remember," said Christopher curtly.

An hour later, Pamela, driving home with her mother, congratulated herself, as even the best people are p.r.o.ne to do, when she saw on the gravel-sweep the fresh double wheel tracks that indicated that visitors had come and gone. She felt that she had talked enough for one afternoon during the visit to old Lady Eyrecourt, whose deaf sister had fallen to her share, and she did not echo her mother's regret at missing Miss Mullen and her cousin. She threw down the handful of cards on the hall table again, and went with a tired step to look for Christopher in the smoking-room, where she found him with Captain Cursiter, the latter in the act of taking his departure. The manner of her greeting showed that he was an accustomed sight there, and, as a matter of fact, since Christopher's return Captain Cursiter had found himself at Bruff very often. He had discovered that it was, as he expressed it, the only house in the country where the women let him alone. Lady Dysart had expressed the position from another point of view, when she had deplored to Mrs. Gascogne Pamela's "hopeless friendliness" towards men, and Mrs. Gascogne had admitted that there might be something discouraging to a man in being treated as if he were a younger sister.

This unsuitable friendliness was candidly apparent in Pamela's regret when she heard that Cursiter had come to Bruff with the news that his regiment was to leave Ireland for Aldershot in a fortnight.

"Here's Captain Cursiter trying to stick me with the launch at an alarming reduction, as the property of an officer going abroad," said Christopher. "He wants to take advantage of my grief, and he won't stay and dine here and let me haggle the thing out comfortably."

"I'm afraid I haven't time to stay," said Cursiter rather cheerlessly. "I've got to go up to Dublin tomorrow, and I'm very busy. I'll come over again-if I may-when I get back." He felt all the awkwardness of a self-conscious man in the prominence of making a farewell that he is beginning to find more unpleasant than he had expected.

"Oh, yes! indeed, you must come over again," said Pamela, in the soft voice that was just Irish enough for Saxons of the more ignorant sort to fail to distinguish, save in degree, between it and Mrs. Lambert's Dublin brogue.

It remained on Captain Cursiter's ear as he stalked down through the shrubberies to the boat-house, and, as he steamed round Curragh Point, and caught the sweet, turfy whiff of the Irish air, he thought drearily of the arid glare of Aldershot, and, without any apparent connection of ideas, he wondered if the Dysarts were really coming to town next month.

Not long after his departure Lady Dysart rustled into the smoking-room in her solemnly sumptuous widow's dress.

"Is he gone?" she breathed in a stage whisper, pausing on the threshold for a reply.

"No; he's hiding behind the door," answered Christopher; "he always does that when he hears you coming." When Christopher was irritated, his method of showing it was generally so subtle as only to satisfy himself; it slipped through the wide and generous mesh of his mother's understanding without the smallest friction.

"Nonsense, Christopher!" she said, not without a furtive glance behind the door. "What a visitation you have had from the whole set! Had they anything interesting to say for themselves? Charlotte Mullen generally is a great alleviation."

"Oh yes," replied her son, examining the end of his cigarette with a peculiar expression, "she-she alleviated about as much as usual; but it was Cursiter who brought the news."

"I can't imagine Captain Cursiter so far forgetting himself as to tell any news," said Lady Dysart; "but perhaps he makes an exception in your favour."

"They're to go to Aldershot in a fortnight," said Christopher.

"You don't say so!" exclaimed his mother, with an irrepressible look at Pamela, who was sitting on the floor in the window, taking a thorn out of Max's spatulate paw. "In a fortnight? I wonder how Mr. Hawkins will like that? Evelyn said that Miss Coppard told her the marriage was to come off when the regiment went back to England."

Christopher grunted unsympathetically, and Pamela continued her researches for the thorn.

"Well," resumed Lady Dysart, "I, for one, shall not regret them. Selfish and second-rate!"

"Which is which?" asked Christopher, eliminating any tinge of interest or encouragement from his voice. He was quite aware that his mother was in this fashion avenging the slaughter of the hope that she had secretly nourished about Captain Cursiter, and, being in a perturbed frame of mind, it annoyed him.

"I think your friend is the most self-centred, ungenial man I have ever known," replied Lady Dysart, in sonorous denunciation, "and if Mr. Hawkins is not second-rate, his friends are, which comes to the same thing! And, by the by, how was it that he went away before Captain Cursiter? Did not they come together?"

"Miss Mullen and Mrs. Lambert gave him a lift," said Christopher, uncommunicatively; "I believe they overtook him on his way here."

Lady Dysart meditated, with her dark eyebrows drawn into a frown.

"I think that girl will make a very great mistake if she begins a flirtation with Mr. Hawkins again," she said presently; "there has been quite enough talk about her already in connection with her marriage." Lady Dysart untied her bonnet strings as if with a need of more air, and flung them back over each shoulder. In the general contrariety of things, it was satisfactory to find an object so undeniably deserving of reprobation as the new Mrs. Lambert. "I call her a thorough adventuress!" she continued. "She came down here, determined to marry some one, and as Mr. Hawkins escaped from her, she just s.n.a.t.c.hed at the next man she could find!"

Pamela came over and sat down on the arm of her mother's chair. "Now, mamma," she said, putting her arm round Lady Dysart's c.r.a.pe-clad shoulder, "you can't deny that she knew all about the Dublin clergy and went to Sunday-school regularly for ten years and she guessed two lights of an acrostic for you."

"Yes, two that happened to be slangy! No, my dear child, I admit that she is very pretty, but, as I said before, she has proved herself to be nothing but an adventuress. Everyone in the country has said the same thing!"

"I can scarcely imagine anyone less like an adventuress," said Christopher, with the determined quietness by which he sometimes mastered his stammer.

His mother looked at him with the most unaffected surprise. "And I can scarcely imagine anyone who knows less about the matter than you!" she retorted. "Oh, my dear boy, don't smoke another of those horrid things," as Christopher got up abruptly and began to fumble rather aimlessly in a cigarette-box on the chimney-piece, "I'm sure you've smoked more than is good for you. You look quite white already."

He made no reply, and his mother's thoughts reverted to the subject under discussion. Suddenly a little cloud of memory began to appear on her mental horizon. Now that she came to think of it, had not Kate Gascogne once mentioned Christopher's name to her in preposterous connection with that of the present Mrs. Lambert?

"Let me tell you!" she exclaimed, her deep-set eyes glowing with the triumphant effort of memory "that people said she did her very utmost to capture you! and I can very well believe it of her; a grievous waste of ammunition on her part, wasn't it, Pamela? Though it did not result in an engagement!" she added, highly pleased at being able to press a pun into her argument.

"Oh, I think she spared Christopher," struck in Pamela with a conciliatory laugh; "'Poor is the conquest of the timid hare,' you know!" She was aware of something portentously rigid in her brother's att.i.tude, and would have given much to have changed the conversation, but the situation was beyond her control.

"I don't think she would have thought it such a poor conquest," said Lady Dysart indignantly; "a girl like that, accustomed to attorneys' clerks and commercial travellers-she'd have done anything short of suicide for such a chance!"

Christopher had stood silent during this discussion. He was losing his temper, but he was doing it after his fashion, slowly and almost imperceptibly. The pity for Mr. Lambert's wife, that had been a primary result of Charlotte's indictment, flamed up into quixotism, and every word his mother said was making him more hotly faithful to the time when his conquest had been complete.

"I daresay it will surprise you to hear that I gave her the chance, and she didn't take it," he said suddenly.

Lady Dysart grasped the arms of her chair, and then fell back into it.

"You did!"

"Yes, I did," replied Christopher, beginning to walk towards the door. He knew he had done a thing that was not only superfluous, but savoured repulsively of the pseudo-heroic, and the att.i.tude in which he had placed himself was torture to his reserve. "This great honour was offered to her," he went on, taking refuge in lame satire, "last August, unstimulated by any attempts at suicide on her part, and she refused it. I-I think it would be kinder if you put her down as a harmless lunatic, than as an adventuress, as far as I am concerned." He shut the door behind him as he finished speaking, and Lady Dysart was left staring at her daughter, complexity of emotions making speech an idle thing.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

The question, ten days afterwards, to anyone who had known all the features of the case, would have been whether Francie was worth Christopher's act of championing.

At the back of the Rosemount kitchen-garden the ground rose steeply into a knoll of respectable height, where grew a tangle of lilac bushes, rhododendrons, seringas, and yellow broom. A gravel path wound ingratiatingly up through these, in curves artfully devised by Mr. Lambert to make the most of the extent and the least of the hill, and near the top a gardenseat was sunk in the bank, with laurels shutting it in on each side, and a laburnum "showering golden tears" above it. Through the perfumed screen of the lilac bushes in front unromantic glimpses of the roof of the house were obtainable-eyesores to Mr. Lambert, who had concentrated all his energies on hiding everything nearer than the semi-circle of lake and distant mountain held in an opening cut through the rhododendrons at the corner of the little plateau on which the seat stood. Without the disturbance of middle distance the eye lay at ease on the far-off struggle of the Connemara mountains, and on a serene vista of Loughmoyle; a view that enticed forth, as to a playground, the wildest and most foolish imaginations, and gave them elbow-room; a world so large and remote that it needed the sound of wheels on the road to recall the existence of the petty humanities of Lismoyle.

Francie and Hawkins were sitting there on the afternoon of the day on which Lambert was expected to come home, and as the sun, that had stared in at them through the opening in the rhododendrons when they first went there, slid farther round, their voices sank in unconscious accord with the fading splendours of the afternoon, and their silences seemed momently more difficult to break. They were nearing the end of the phase that had begun in the wood at Bruff, impelled to its verge by the unspoken knowledge that the last of the unthinking, dangerous days were dying with the sun, and that a final parting was looming up beyond. Neither knew for certain the mind of the other, or how they had dropped into this so-called friendship that in half a dozen afternoons had robbed all other things of reality, and made the intervals between their meetings like a feverish dream. Francie did not dare to think much about it; she lived in a lime-light glow that surrounded her wherever she went, and all the world outside was dark. He was going in a fortnight, in ten days, in a week; that was the only fact that the future had held for her since Captain Cursiter had met them with the telegram in his hand on the lake sh.o.r.e at Bruff. She forgot her resolutions; she forgot her pride; and before she reached home that afternoon the spell of the new phase, that was the old, only intensified by forgiveness, was on her. She shut her eyes, and blindly gave house-room in her heart to the subtle pa.s.sion that came in the garb of an old friend, with a cant about compa.s.sion on its lips, and perfidious promises that its life was only for a fortnight.

To connect this supreme crisis of a life with such a person as Mr. Gerald Hawkins may seem incongruous; but Francie was not aware of either crisis or incongruity. All she knew of was the enthralment that lay in each prosaic afternoon visit, all she felt, the tired effort of conscience against fascination. Her emotional Irish nature, with all its frivolity and recklessness, had also, far down in it, an Irish girl's moral principle and purity; but each day she found it more difficult to hide the truth from him; each day the under-currents of feeling drew them helplessly nearer to each other. Everything was against her. Lambert's business had, as he expected, taken him to Dublin, and kept him there; Cursiter, like most men, was chary of active interference in another man's affairs, whatever his private opinion might be; and Charlotte, that guardian of youth, that trusty and vigilant spy, sat in her own room writing interminable letters, or went on long and complicated shopping expeditions whenever Hawkins came to the house.

On this golden, still afternoon, Francie strayed out soon after lunch into the garden, half dazed with unhappiness and excitement. To-night her husband would come home. In four days Hawkins would have gone, as eternally, so far as she was concerned, as if he were dead; he would soon forget her, she thought, as she walked to and fro among the blossoming apple trees in the kitchen-garden. Men forgot very easily, and, thanks to the way she had tried her best to make him think she didn't care, there was not a word of hers to bring him back to her. She hated herself for her discretion; her soul thirsted for even one word of understanding, that would be something to live upon in future days of abnegation, when it would be nothing to her that she had gained his respect, and one tender memory would be worth a dozen self-congratulations.

She turned at the end of the walk and came back again under the apple trees; the ground under her feet was white with fallen blossoms; her fair hair gleamed among the thick embroidery of the branches, and her face was not shamed by their translucent pink and white. At a little distance Eliza Hackett, in a starched lilac calico, was gathering spinach, and mediating no doubt with comfortable a.s.surance on the legitimacy of Father Heffernan's apostolic succession, but outwardly the embodiment of solid house-hold routine and respectability. As Francie pa.s.sed her she raised her decorous face from the spinach-bed with a question as to whether the trout would be for dinner or for breakfast; the master always fancied fish for his breakfast, she reminded Francie. Eliza Hackett's tone was distant, but admonitory, and it dispelled in a moment the visions of another now impossible future that were holding high carnival before Francie's vexed eyes. The fetter made itself coldly felt, and following came the quick pang of remorse at the thought of the man who was wasting on her the best love he had to give. Her change of mood was headlong, but its only possible expression was trivial to absurdity, if indeed any incident in a soul's struggle can be called trivial. Some day, further on in eternity, human beings will know what their standards of proportion and comparison are worth, and may perhaps find the glory of some trifling actions almost insufferable.

She gave the necessary order, and hurrying into the house brought out from it the piece of corduroy that she was st.i.tching in lines of red silk as a waistcoat for her husband, and with a childish excitement at the thought of this expiation, took the path the led to the shrubbery on the hill. As she reached its first turn she hesitated and stopped, an idea of further and fuller renunciation occurring to her. Turning, she called to the figure stooping among the glossy rows of spinach to desire that the parlour-maid should say that this afternoon she was not at home. Had Eliza Hackett then and there obeyed the order, it is possible that many things would have happened differently. But fate is seldom without a second string to her bow, and even if Francie's message had not been delayed by Eliza Hackett's determination to gather a pint of green gooseberries before she went in, it is possible that Hawkins would, none the less have found his way to the top of the shrubbery, where Francie was sewing with the a.s.siduity of Penelope. It was about four o'clock when she heard his steps coming up the devious slants of the path, and she knew as she heard it that, in spite of all her precautions, she had expected him. His manner and even his look had nothing now in them of the confident lover of last year; his flippancy was gone, and when he began by reproaching her for having hidden from him, his face was angry and wretched, and he spoke like a person who has been seriously and unjustly hurt. He was more in love than he had ever been before, and he was taking it badly, like a fever that the chills of opposition were driving back into his system.

She made excuses as best she might, with her eyes bent upon her work.

"I might have been sitting in the drawing-room now," he said petulantly; "only that Miss Mullen had seen you going off here by yourself, and told me I'd better go and find you."

An unreasoning fear came over Francie, a fear as of something uncanny.

"Let us go back to the house," she said; "Charlotte will be expecting us." She said it to contradict the thought that had become definite for the first time. "Come; I'm going in."

Hawkins did not move. "I suppose you forget that this is Wednesday, and that I'm going on Sat.u.r.day," he replied dully. "In any case you'll not be much good to Charlotte. She's gone up to pack her things. She told me herself she was going to be very busy, as she had to start at six o'clock."

Francie leaned back, and realised that now she had no one to look to but herself, and happiness and misery fought within her till her hands trembled as she worked.

Each knew that this was, to all intents and purposes, their last meeting, and their consciousness was charged to br.i.m.m.i.n.g with unexpressed farewell. She talked of indifferent subjects; of what Aldershot would be like, of what Lismoyle would think of the new regiment, of the trouble that he would have in packing his pictures, parrying, with a weakening hand, his efforts to make every subject personal; and all the time the laburnum drooped in beautiful despair above her, as if listening and grieving, and the cool-leaved lilac sent its fragrance to mingle with her pain, and to stir her to rebellion with the ecstasy of spring-time. The minutes pa.s.sed barrenly by, and, as has been said, the silences became longer and more clinging, and the thoughts that filled them made each successive subject more bare and artificial. At last Hawkins got up, and walking to the opening cut in the shrubs, stood, with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the lake and the mountains. Francie st.i.tched on; it seemed to her that if she stopped she would lose her last hold upon herself; she felt as if her work were a talisman to remind her of all the things that she was in peril of forgetting. When, that night, she took up the waistcoat again to work at it, she thought that her heart's blood had gone into the red st.i.tches.

It was several minutes before Hawkins spoke. "Francie," he said, turning round and speaking thickly, "are you going to let me leave you in this- in this kind of way? Have you realised that when I go on Sat.u.r.day it's most likely-it's pretty certain, in fact-that we shall never see each other again?"

"Yes, I have," she said, after a pause of a second or two. She did not say that for a fortnight her soul had beaten itself against the thought, and that to hear it in words was as much as her self-command could bear.

"You seem to care a great deal!" he said violently; "you're thinking of nothing but that infernal piece of work, that I loathe the very sight of. Don't you think you could do without it for five minutes, at all events?"

She let her hands drop into her lap, but made no other reply.

"You're not a bit like what you used to be. You seem to take a delight in snubbing me and shutting me up. I must say, I never thought you'd have turned into a prig!" He felt this reproach to be so biting that he paused upon it to give it its full effect. "Here I am going to England in fout days, and to India in four months, and it's ten to one if I ever come home again. I mean to volunteer for the very first row that turns up. But it's just the same to you, you won't even take the trouble to say you're sorry."

"If you had taken the trouble to answer my letters last autumn, you wouldn't be saying these things to me now," she said, speaking low and hurriedly.

"I don't believe it! I believe if you had cared about me then you wouldn't treat me like this now."

"I did care for you," she said, while the hard-held tears forced their way to her eyes; "you made me do it, and then you threw me over, and now you're trying to put the blame on me!"

He saw the glisten on her eyelashes, and it almost took from him the understanding of what she said.

"Francie," he said, his voice shaking, and his usually confident eyes owning the infection of her tears, "you might forget that. I'm miserable. I can't bear to leave you!" He sat down again beside her, and, catching her hand, kissed it with a pa.s.sion of repentance. He felt it shrink from his lips, but the touch of it had intoxicated him, and suddenly she was in his arms.

For a speechless instant they clung to each other; her head dropped to his shoulder, as if the sharp release from the tension of the last fortnight had killed her, and the familiar voice murmured in her ear: "Say it to me-say you love me."

"Yes I do-my dearest-" she said, with a moan that was tragically at variance with the confession. "Ah, why do you make me so wicked!" She s.n.a.t.c.hed herself away from him, and stood up, trembling all over. "I wish I had never seen you- I wish I was dead."

"I don't care what you say now," said Hawkins, springing to his feet, "you've said you loved me, and I know you meant it. Will you stand by it?" he went on wildly. "If you'll only say the word I'll chuck everything overboard-I can't go away from you like this. Once I'm in England I can't get back here, and if I did, what good would it be to me? He'd never give us a chance of seeing each other, and we'd both be more miserable than we are, unless- unless there was a chance of meeting you in Dublin or somewhere-?" He stopped for an instant. Francie mutely shook her head. "Well, then, I shall never see you."

There was silence, and the words settled down into both their hearts. He cursed himself for being afraid of her, she, whom he had always felt to be his inferior, yet when he spoke it was with an effort.

"Come away with me out of this-come away with me for good and all! What's the odds? We can't be more than happy!"

Francie made an instinctive gesture with her hand while he spoke, as if to stop him, but she said nothing, and almost immediately the distant rush and rattle of a train came quietly into the stillness.

"That's his train!" she exclaimed, looking as startled as if the sound had been a sign from heaven, "Oh, go away! He mustn't meet you coming away from here."

"I'll go if you give me a kiss," he answered drunkenly. His arms were round her again when they dropped to his side as if he had been shot.

There was a footstep on the path immediately below the lilac bushes, and Charlotte's voice called to Francie that she was just starting for home and had come to make her adieux.

CHAPTER XLIX.

Christopher Dysart drove to Rosemount next morning to see Mr. Lambert on business. He noticed Mrs. Lambert standing at the drawing-room window as he drove up, but she left the window before he reached the hall door, and he went straight to Mr. Lambert's study without seeing her again.

Francie returned listlessly to the seat that she had sprung from with a terrified throb of the heart at the thought that the wheels might be those of Hawkins' trap, and, putting her elbow on the arm of the chair, rested her forehead on her hand; her other hand drooped over the side of the chair, holding still in it the sprig of pink hawthorn that her husband had given her in the garden an hour before. Her att.i.tude was full of languor, but her brain was working at its highest pressure, and at this moment she was asking herself what Sir Christopher would say when he heard that she had gone away with Gerald. She had seen him vaguely as one of the crowd of contemptuous or horror-stricken faces that had thronged about her pillow in the early morning, but his opinion had carried no more restraining power than that of Aunt Tish, or Uncle Robert, or Charlotte. Nothing had weighed with her then; the two princ.i.p.al figures in her life contrasted as simply and convincingly as night and day, and like night and day, too, were the alternative futures that were in her hand to choose from. Her eyes were open to her wrong-doing, but scarcely to her cruelty; it could not be as bad for Roddy, she thought, to live without her as for her to stay with him and think of Gerald in India, gone away from her for ever. Her reasoning power was easily mastered, her conscience was a thing of habit, and not fitted to grapple with this turbulent pa.s.sion. She swept towards her ruin like a little boat staggering under more sail than she can carry. But the sight of Christopher, momentary as it was, had startled for an instant the wildness of her thoughts; the saner breath of the outside world had come with him, and a touch of the self-respect that she had always gained from him made her press her hot forehead against her hand, and realise that the way of transgressors would be hard.

She remained sitting there, almost motionless, for a long time. She had no wish to occupy herself with anything; all the things about her had already the air of belonging to a past existence; her short sovereignty was over, and even the furniture that she had, a few weeks ago, pulled about and rearranged in the first ardour of possession seemed to look at her in a decorous, clannish way, as if she were already an alien. At last she heard the study door open, and immediately afterwards, Christopher's dog-cart went down the drive. It occurred to her that now, if ever, was the time to go to her husband and see whether, by diplomacy, she could evade the ride that he had asked her to take with him that afternoon. Hawkins had sent her a note saying that he would come to pay a farewell visit, a cautiously formal note that anyone might have seen, but that she was just as glad had not been seen by her husband, and at all hazards she must stay in to meet him. She got up and went to the study with a nervous colour in her cheeks, glancing out of the hall window as she pa.s.sed it, with the idea that the threatening grey of the sky would be a good argument for staying at home. But if it rained, Roddy might stay at home, too, she thought, and that would be worse than anything. That was her last thought as she went into the study.

Lambert was standing with his hands in his pockets, looking down at the pile of papers and books on the table, and Francie was instantly struck by something unwonted in his att.i.tude, something rigid and yet spent, that was very different from his ususal bearing. He looked at her with heavy eyes, and going to his chair let himself drop into it; then, still silently, he held out his hand to her. She thought he looked older, and that his face was puffy and unattractive, and in the highly-strung state of her nerves she felt a repugnance to him that almost horrified her. It is an unfortunate trait of human nature that a call for sympathy from a person with whom sympathy has been lost has a repellent instead of an attractive power, and if a strong emotion does not appear pathetic, it is terribly near the ludicrous. In justice to Francie it must be said that her dominant feeling as she gave Lambert her hand and was drawn down on to his knee was less repulsion than a sense of her own hypocrisy.

"What's the matter, Roddy?" she asked, after a second or two of silence, during which she felt the labouring of his breath.

"I'm done for," he said, "that's what's the matter."

"Why! what do you mean?" she exclaimed, turning her startled face half towards him, and trying not to shrink as his hot breath struck on her cheek.

"I've lost the agency."

"Lost the agency!" repeated Francie, feeling as though the world with all the things she believed to be most solid were rocking under her feet. "Do you mean he's after dismissing you?"

Lambert moved involuntarily, from the twitch of pain that the word gave him. It was this very term that Lismoyle would soon apply to him, as if he were a thieving butler or a drunken coachman.

"That's about what it will come to," he said bitterly. "He was too d.a.m.ned considerate to tell me so to-day, but he's going to do it. He's always hated me just as I've hated him, and this is his chance, though G.o.d knows what's given it to him!"

"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 G.o.d!" 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 abas.e.m.e.nt.

"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.