The floor of the potato loft at Gurthnamuckla had for a long time needed repairs, a circumstance not in itself distressing to Miss Mullen, who held that effort after mere theoretical symmetry was unjustifiable waste of time in either housekeeping or farming. On this first of June, however, an intimation from Norry that “there’s ne’er a pratie ye have that isn’t ate with the rats,” given with the thinly-veiled triumph of servants in such announcements, caused a truculent visit of inspection to the potato loft; and in her first spare moment of the afternoon, Miss Mullen set forth with her tool-basket, and some boards from a packing-case, to make good the breaches with her own hands. Doing it herself saved the necessity of taking the men from their work, and moreover ensured its being properly done.

So she thought, as, having climbed the ladder that led from the cowhouse to the loft, she put her tools on the ground, and surveyed with a workman’s eye the job she had set herself. The loft was hot and airless, redolent of the cowhouse below, as well as of the clayey mustiness of the potatoes that were sprouting in the dirt on the floor, and even sending pallid, worm-like roots down into space through the cracks in the boards. Miss Mullen propped the window-shutter open with the largest potato, and, pinning up her skirt, fell to work.

She had been hammering and sawing for a quarter of an hour when she heard the clatter of a horse’s hoofs on the cobble-stones of the yard, and, getting up from her knees, advanced to the window with caution and looked out. It was Mr. Lambert, in the act of pulling up his awkward young horse, and she stood looking down at him in silence while he dismounted, with a remarkable expression on her face, one in which some acute mental process was mixed with the half-unconscious and yet all-observant recognition of an intensely familiar object.

“Hullo, Roddy!” she called out at last, “is that you? What brings you over so early?”

Mr. Lambert started with more violence than the occasion seemed to demand.

“Hullo!” he replied, in a voice not like his own, “is that where you are?”

“Yes, and it’s where I’m going to stay. This is the kind of fancy work I’m at,” brandishing her saw; “so if you want to talk to me you must come up here.”

“All right,” said Lambert, gloomily, “I’ll come up as soon as I put the colt in the stable.”

It is a fact so improbable as to be worth noting, that before Lambert found his way up the ladder, Miss Mullen had unpinned her skirt and fastened up the end of a plait that had escaped from the massive coils at the back of her head.

“Well, and where’s the woman that owns you?” she asked, beginning to work again, while her visitor stood in obvious discomfort, with his head touching the rafters, and the light from the low window striking sharply up against his red and heavy eyes.

“At home,” he replied, almost vacantly. “I’d have been here half an hour ago or more,” he went on after a moment or two, “but the colt cast a shoe, and I had to go on to the forge beyond the cross to get it put on.”

Charlotte, with a flat pencil in her mouth, grunted responsively, while she measured off a piece of board, and, holding it with her knee on the body of a legless wheelbarrow, began to saw it across. Lambert looked on, provoked and disconcerted by this engrossing industry. With his brimming sense of collapse and crisis, he felt that even this temporary delay of sympathy was an unkindness.

“That colt must be sold this week, so I couldn’t afford to knock his hoof to bits on the hard road.” His manner was so portentous that Charlotte looked up again, and permitted herself to remark on what had been apparent to her the moment she saw him.

“Why, what’s the matter with you, Roddy? Now I come to see you, you look as if you’d been at your own funeral.”

“I wish to God I had! It would be the best thing could happen me.”

He found pleasure in saying something to startle her, and in seeing that her face became a shade hotter than the stifling air and the stooping over her work had made it.

“What makes you talk like that?” she said, a little strangely, as it seemed to him.

He thought she was moved, and he immediately felt his position to be more pathetic than he had believed. It would be much easier to explain the matter to Charlotte than to Francie, he felt at once; Charlotte understood business matters, a formula which conveyed to his mind much comfortable flexibility in money affairs.

“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.”

“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!”

Charlotte was standing, yellow-faced and insolent, opposite to Lambert, with her hands in the pockets of her apron; in every way a contrast to him, with his flushed forehead and suffused eyes. The dull, white light that struck up into the roof from the whitewashed kitchen wall, showed Lambert the furrowed paths of implacability in his adversary’s face, as plainly as it showed her his defeat and desperation.

“You’ve got no more money to lend, d’ye say!” he repeated, with a laugh that showed he had courage enough left to lose his temper; “I suppose you’ve got all the money you got eighteen months ago from the old lady lent out? ’Pon my word, considering you got Francie’s share of it for yourself, I think it would have been civiller to have given her husband the first refusal of a loan! I daresay I’d have given you as good interest as your friends in Ferry Lane!”

Charlotte’s eyes suddenly lost their exaggerated indifference.

“And if she ever had the smallest claim to what ye call a share!” she vociferated, “haven’t you had it twenty times over? Was there ever a time that ye came cringing and crawling to me for money that I refused it to ye? And how do you thank me? By embezzling the money I paid for the land, and then coming to try and get it out of me over again, because Sir Christopher Dysart is taught sense to look into his own affairs, and see how his agent is cheating him!”

Some quality of triumph in her tone, some light of previous knowledge in her eye, struck Lambert.

“Was it you told him?” he said hoarsely, “was it you spoke to Dysart?”

Even now and then in the conduct of her affairs, Miss Mullen permitted the gratification of her temper to take the place of the slower pleasure of secrecy.

“Yes, I told him,” she answered, without hesitation.

“You went to Dysart, and set him on to ruin me!” said Lambert, in a voice that had nearly as much horror as rage in it.

“And may I ask you what you’ve ever done for me,” she said, gripping her hammer with a strong, trembling hand, “that I was to keep your tricks from being found out for you? What reason was there in God’s earth that I wasn’t to do my plain duty by those that are older friends than you?”

“What reason!” Lambert almost choked from the intolerable audacity and heartlessness of the question. “Are you in your right mind to ask me that? You, that’s been like a—a near relation to me all these years, or pretending to be! There was a time you wouldn’t have done this to me, you know it damned well, and so do I. You were glad enough to do anything for me then, so long as I’d be as much as civil to you, and now, I suppose, this is your dirty devilish spite, because you were cut out by someone else!”

She did not flinch as the words went through and through her.

“Take care of yourself!” she said, grinning at him, “perhaps you’re not the one to talk about being cut out! Oh, I don’t think ye need look as if ye didn’t understand me. At all events, all ye have to do is to go home and ask your servants—or, for the matter of that, anyone in the streets of Lismoyle—who it is that’s cut ye out, and made ye the laughing-stock of the country?”

She put her hand on the dusty beam beside her, giddy with her gratified impulse, as she saw him take the blow and wither under it.

She scarcely heard at first the strange and sudden sound of commotion that had sprung up like a wind in the house opposite. The windows were all open, and through them came the sound of banging doors and running footsteps, and then Norry’s voice screaming something as she rushed from room to room. She was in the kitchen now, and the words came gasping and sobbing through the open door.

“Where’s Miss Charlotte? Where is she? O God! O God! Where is she? Miss Francie’s killed, her neck’s broke below on the road! O God of Heaven, help us!”

Neither Charlotte nor Lambert heard clearly what she said, but the shapeless terror of calamity came about them like a vapour and blanched the hatred in their faces. In a moment they were together at the window, and at the same instant Norry burst out into the yard, with outflung arms and grey hair streaming. As she saw Lambert, her strength seemed to go from her. She staggered back, and, catching at the door for support, turned from him and hid her face in her cloak.

FINIS.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, ABERDEEN