Chapter VI: Book II: IX (2)

And Bessy--? Perhaps if their little son had lived she might in turn have obeyed the world-old instinct of self-effacement--but now! He remembered with an intenser self-derision that, not even in the first surprise of his passion, had he deluded himself with the idea that Bessy Westmore was an exception to her sex. He had argued rather that, being only a lovelier product of the common mould, she would abound in the adaptabilities and pliancies which the lords of the earth have seen fit to cultivate in their companions. She would care for his aims because they were his. During their precipitate wooing, and through the first brief months of marriage, this profound and original theory had been gratifyingly confirmed; then its perfect surface had begun to show a flaw. Amherst had always conveniently supposed that the poet's line summed up the good woman's rule of ethics: _He for God only, she for God in him._ It was for the god in him, surely, that she had loved him: for that first glimpse of an "ampler ether, a diviner air" that he had brought into her cramped and curtained life. He could never, now, evoke that earlier delusion without feeling on its still-tender surface the keen edge of Mrs. Ansell's smile. She, no doubt, could have told him at any time why Bessy had married him: it was for his _beaux yeux_, as Mrs. Ansell would have put it--because he was young, handsome, persecuted, an ardent lover if not a subtle one--because Bessy had met him at the fatal moment, because her family had opposed the marriage--because, in brief, the gods, that day, may have been a little short of amusement. Well, they were having their laugh out now--there were moments when high heaven seemed to ring with it....

With these thoughts at his heels Amherst strode on, overtaken now and again by the wheels of departing guests from the garden-party, and knowing, as they passed him, what was in their minds--envy of his success, admiration of his cleverness in achieving it, and a little half-contemptuous pity for his wife, who, with her wealth and looks, might have done so much better. Certainly, if the case could have been put to Hanaford--the Hanaford of the Gaines garden-party--it would have sided with Bessy to a voice. And how much justice was there in what he felt would have been the unanimous verdict of her class? Was his mother right in hinting that he was sacrificing Bessy to the mills? But the mills _were_ Bessy--at least he had thought so when he married her! They were her particular form of contact with life, the expression of her relation to her fellow-men, her pretext, her opportunity--unless they were merely a vast purse in which to plunge for her pin-money! He had fancied it would rest with him to determine from which of these stand-points she should view Westmore; and at the outset she had enthusiastically viewed it from his. In her eager adoption of his ideas she had made a pet of the mills, organizing the Mothers' Club, laying out a recreation-ground on the Hopewood property, and playing with pretty plans in water-colour for the Emergency Hospital and the building which was to contain the night-schools, library and gymnasium; but even these minor projects--which he had urged her to take up as a means of learning their essential dependence on his larger scheme--were soon to be set aside by obstacles of a material order. Bessy always wanted money--not a great deal, but, as she reasonably put it, "enough"--and who was to blame if her father and Mr. Tredegar, each in his different capacity, felt obliged to point out that every philanthropic outlay at Westmore must entail a corresponding reduction in her income? Perhaps if she could have been oftener at Hanaford these arguments would have been counteracted, for she was tender-hearted, and prompt to relieve such suffering as she saw about her; but her imagination was not active, and it was easy for her to forget painful sights when they were not under her eye. This was perhaps--half-consciously--one of the reasons why she avoided Hanaford; why, as Amherst exclaimed, they had been everywhere since their marriage but to the place where their obligations called them. There had, at any rate, always been some good excuse for not returning there, and consequently for postponing the work of improvement which, it was generally felt, her husband could not fitly begin till she _had_ returned and gone over the ground with him. After their marriage, and especially in view of the comment excited by that romantic incident, it was impossible not to yield to her wish that they should go abroad for a few months; then, before her confinement, the doctors had exacted that she should be spared all fatigue and worry; and after the baby's death Amherst had felt with her too tenderly to venture an immediate return to unwelcome questions.

For by this time it had become clear to him that such questions were, and always would be, unwelcome to her. As the easiest means of escaping them, she had once more dismissed the whole problem to the vague and tiresome sphere of "business," whence he had succeeded in detaching it for a moment in the early days of their union. Her first husband--poor unappreciated Westmore!--had always spared her the boredom of "business," and Halford Gaines and Mr. Tredegar were ready to show her the same consideration; it was part of the modern code of chivalry that lovely woman should not be bothered about ways and means. But Bessy was too much the wife--and the wife in love--to consent that her husband's views on the management of the mills should be totally disregarded. Precisely because her advisers looked unfavourably on his intervention, she felt bound--if only in defense of her illusions--to maintain and emphasize it. The mills were, in fact, the official "platform" on which she had married: Amherst's devoted _role_ at Westmore had justified the unconventionality of the step. And so she was committed--the more helplessly for her dense misintelligence of both sides of the question--to the policy of conciliating the opposing influences which had so uncomfortably chosen to fight out their case on the field of her poor little existence: theoretically siding with her husband, but surreptitiously, as he well knew, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, who were really defending her own cause.

All this Amherst saw with that cruel insight which had replaced his former blindness. He was, in truth, more ashamed of the insight than of the blindness: it seemed to him horribly cold-blooded to be thus analyzing, after two years of marriage, the source of his wife's inconsistencies. And, partly for this reason, he had put off from month to month the final question of the future management of the mills, and of the radical changes to be made there if his system were to prevail. But the time had come when, if Bessy had to turn to Westmore for the justification of her marriage, he had even more need of calling upon it for the same service. He had not, assuredly, married her because of Westmore; but he would scarcely have contemplated marriage with a rich woman unless the source of her wealth had offered him some such opportunity as Westmore presented. His special training, and the natural bent of his mind, qualified him, in what had once seemed a predestined manner, to help Bessy to use her power nobly, for her own uplifting as well as for that of Westmore; and so the mills became, incongruously enough, the plank of safety to which both clung in their sense of impending disaster.

It was not that Amherst feared the temptation to idleness if this outlet for his activity were cut off. He had long since found that the luxury with which his wife surrounded him merely quickened his natural bent for hard work and hard fare. He recalled with a touch of bitterness how he had once regretted having separated himself from his mother's class, and how seductive for a moment, to both mind and senses, that other life had appeared. Well--he knew it now, and it had neither charm nor peril for him. Capua must have been a dull place to one who had once drunk the joy of battle. What he dreaded was not that he should learn to love the life of ease, but that he should grow to loathe it uncontrollably, as the symbol of his mental and spiritual bondage. And Westmore was his safety-valve, his refuge--if he were cut off from Westmore what remained to him? It was not only the work he had found to his hand, but the one work for which his hand was fitted. It was his life that he was fighting for in insisting that now at last, before the close of this long-deferred visit to Hanaford, the question of the mills should be faced and settled. He had made that clear to Bessy, in a scene he still shrank from recalling; for it was of the essence of his somewhat unbending integrity that he would not trick her into a confused surrender to the personal influence he still possessed over her, but must seek to convince her by the tedious process of argument and exposition, against which she knew no defense but tears and petulance. But he had, at any rate, gained her consent to his setting forth his views at the meeting of directors the next morning; and meanwhile he had meant to be extraordinarily patient and reasonable with her, till the hint of Mrs. Ansell's stratagem produced in him a fresh reaction of distrust.

XII

THAT evening when dinner ended, Mrs. Ansell, with a glance through the tall dining-room windows, had suggested to Bessy that it would be pleasanter to take coffee on the verandah; but Amherst detained his wife with a glance.

"I should like Bessy to stay," he said.

The dining-room being on the cool side the house, with a refreshing outlook on the garden, the men preferred to smoke there rather than in the stuffily-draped Oriental apartment destined to such rites; and Bessy Amherst, with a faint sigh, sank back into her seat, while Mrs. Ansell drifted out through one of the open windows.

The men surrounding Richard Westmore's table were the same who nearly three years earlier had gathered in his house for the same purpose: the discussion of conditions at the mills. The only perceptible change in the relation to each other of the persons composing this group was that John Amherst was now the host of the other two, instead of being a subordinate called in for cross-examination; but he was so indifferent, or at least so heedless, a host--so forgetful, for instance, of Mr. Tredegar's preference for a "light" cigar, and of Mr. Langhope's feelings on the duty of making the Westmore madeira circulate with the sun--that the change was manifest only in his evening-dress, and in the fact of his sitting at the foot of the table.

If Amherst was conscious of the contrast thus implied, it was only as a restriction on his freedom. As far as the welfare of Westmore was concerned he would rather have stood before his companions as the assistant manager of the mills than as the husband of their owner; and it seemed to him, as he looked back, that he had done very little with the opportunity which looked so great in the light of his present restrictions. What he _had_ done with it--the use to which, as unfriendly critics might insinuate, he had so adroitly put it--had landed him, ironically enough, in the ugly _impasse_ of a situation from which no issue seemed possible without some wasteful sacrifice of feeling.

His wife's feelings, for example, were already revealing themselves in an impatient play of her fan that made her father presently lean forward to suggest: "If we men are to talk shop, is it necessary to keep Bessy in this hot room?"

Amherst rose and opened the window behind his wife's chair.

"There's a breeze from the west--the room will be cooler now," he said, returning to his seat.

"Oh, I don't mind--" Bessy murmured, in a tone intended to give her companions the full measure of what she was being called on to endure.

Mr. Tredegar coughed slightly. "May I trouble you for that other box of cigars, Amherst? No, _not_ the Cabanas." Bessy rose and handed him the box on which his glance significantly rested. "Ah, thank you, my dear. I was about to ask," he continued, looking about for the cigar-lighter, which flamed unheeded at Amherst's elbow, "what special purpose will be served by a preliminary review of the questions to be discussed tomorrow."

"Ah--exactly," murmured Mr. Langhope. "The madeira, my dear John? No--ah--_please_--to the left!"

Amherst impatiently reversed the direction in which he had set the precious vessel moving, and turned to Mr. Tredegar, who was conspicuously lighting his cigar with a match extracted from his waist-coat pocket.

"The purpose is to define my position in the matter; and I prefer that Bessy should do this with your help rather than with mine."

Mr. Tredegar surveyed his cigar through drooping lids, as though the question propounded by Amherst were perched on its tip.

"Is not your position naturally involved in and defined by hers? You will excuse my saying that--technically speaking, of course--I cannot distinctly conceive of it as having any separate existence."

Mr. Tredegar spoke with the deliberate mildness that was regarded as his most effective weapon at the bar, since it was likely to abash those who were too intelligent to be propitiated by it.

"Certainly it is involved in hers," Amherst agreed; "but how far that defines it is just what I have waited till now to find out."

Bessy at this point recalled her presence by a restless turn of her graceful person, and her father, with an affectionate glance at her, interposed amicably: "But surely--according to old-fashioned ideas--it implies identity of interests?"

"Yes; but whose interests?" Amherst asked.

"Why--your wife's, man! She owns the mills."

Amherst hesitated. "I would rather talk of my wife's interest in the mills than of her interests there; but we'll keep to the plural if you prefer it. Personally, I believe the terms should be interchangeable in the conduct of such a business."

"Ah--I'm glad to hear that," said Mr. Tredegar quickly, "since it's precisely the view we all take."

Amherst's colour rose. "Definitions are ambiguous," he said. "Before you adopt mine, perhaps I had better develop it a little farther. What I mean is, that Bessy's interests in Westmore should be regulated by her interest in it--in its welfare as a social body, aside from its success as a commercial enterprise. If we agree on this definition, we are at one as to the other: namely that my relation to the matter is defined by hers."

He paused a moment, as if to give his wife time to contribute some sign of assent and encouragement; but she maintained a puzzled silence and he went on: "There is nothing new in this. I have tried to make Bessy understand from the beginning what obligations I thought the ownership of Westmore entailed, and how I hoped to help her fulfill them; but ever since our marriage all definite discussion of the subject has been put off for one cause or another, and that is my reason for urging that it should be brought up at the directors' meeting tomorrow."

There was another pause, during which Bessy glanced tentatively at Mr. Tredegar, and then said, with a lovely rise of colour: "But, John, I sometimes think you forget how much has been done at Westmore--the Mothers' Club, and the play-ground, and all--in the way of carrying out your ideas."

Mr. Tredegar discreetly dropped his glance to his cigar, and Mr. Langhope sounded an irrepressible note of approval and encouragement.

Amherst smiled. "No, I have not forgotten; and I am grateful to you for giving my ideas a trial. But what has been done hitherto is purely superficial." Bessy's eyes clouded, and he added hastily: "Don't think I undervalue it for that reason--heaven knows the surface of life needs improving! But it's like picking flowers and sticking them in the ground to make a garden--unless you transplant the flower with its roots, and prepare the soil to receive it, your garden will be faded tomorrow. No radical changes have yet been made at Westmore; and it is of radical changes that I want to speak."

Bessy's look grew more pained, and Mr. Langhope exclaimed with unwonted irascibility: "Upon my soul, Amherst, the tone you take about what your wife has done doesn't strike me as the likeliest way of encouraging her to do more!"

"I don't want to encourage her to do more on such a basis--the sooner she sees the futility of it the better for Westmore!"

"The futility--?" Bessy broke out, with a flutter of tears in her voice; but before her father could intervene Mr. Tredegar had raised his hand with the gesture of one accustomed to wield the gavel.

"My dear child, I see Amherst's point, and it is best, as he says, that you should see it too. What he desires, as I understand it, is the complete reconstruction of the present state of things at Westmore; and he is right in saying that all your good works there--night-schools, and nursery, and so forth--leave that issue untouched."

A smile quivered under Mr. Langhope's moustache. He and Amherst both knew that Mr. Tredegar's feint of recognizing the justice of his adversary's claim was merely the first step to annihilating it; but Bessy could never be made to understand this, and always felt herself deserted and betrayed when any side but her own was given a hearing.

"I'm sorry if all I have tried to do at Westmore is useless--but I suppose I shall never understand business," she murmured, vainly seeking consolation in her father's eye.

"This is not business," Amherst broke in. "It's the question of your personal relation to the people there--the last thing that business considers."

Mr. Langhope uttered an impatient exclamation. "I wish to heaven the owner of the mills had made it clear just what that relation was to be!"

"I think he did, sir," Amherst answered steadily, "in leaving his wife the unrestricted control of the property."

He had reddened under Mr. Langhope's thrust, but his voice betrayed no irritation, and Bessy rewarded him with an unexpected beam of sympathy: she was always up in arms at the least sign of his being treated as an intruder.

"I am sure, papa," she said, a little tremulously, "that poor Richard, though he knew I was not clever, felt he could trust me to take the best advice----"

"Ah, that's all we ask of you, my child!" her father sighed, while Mr. Tredegar drily interposed: "We are merely losing time by this digression. Let me suggest that Amherst should give us an idea of the changes he wishes to make at Westmore."

Amherst, as he turned to answer, remembered with what ardent faith in his powers of persuasion he had responded to the same appeal three years earlier. He had thought then that all his cause needed was a hearing; now he knew that the practical man's readiness to let the idealist talk corresponds with the busy parent's permission to destructive infancy to "run out and play." They would let him state his case to the four corners of the earth--if only he did not expect them to act on it! It was their policy to let him exhaust himself in argument and exhortation, to listen to him so politely and patiently that if he failed to enforce his ideas it should not be for lack of opportunity to expound them.... And the alternative struck him as hardly less to be feared. Supposing that the incredible happened, that his reasons prevailed with his wife, and, through her, with the others--at what cost would the victory be won? Would Bessy ever forgive him for winning it? And what would his situation be, if it left him in control of Westmore but estranged from his wife?

He recalled suddenly a phrase he had used that afternoon to the dark-eyed girl at the garden-party: "What risks we run when we scramble into the chariot of the gods!" And at the same instant he heard her retort, and saw her fine gesture of defiance. How could he ever have doubted that the thing was worth doing at whatever cost? Something in him--some secret lurking element of weakness and evasion--shrank out of sight in the light of her question: "Do _you_ act on that?" and the "God forbid!" he had instantly flashed back to her. He turned to Mr. Tredegar with his answer.

Amherst knew that any large theoretical exposition of the case would be as much wasted on the two men as on his wife. To gain his point he must take only one step at a time, and it seemed to him that the first thing needed at Westmore was that the hands should work and live under healthier conditions. To attain this, two important changes were necessary: the floor-space of the mills must be enlarged, and the company must cease to rent out tenements, and give the operatives the opportunity to buy land for themselves. Both these changes involved the upheaval of the existing order. Whenever the Westmore mills had been enlarged, it had been for the sole purpose of increasing the revenues of the company; and now Amherst asked that these revenues should be materially and permanently reduced. As to the suppression of the company tenement, such a measure struck at the roots of the baneful paternalism which was choking out every germ of initiative in the workman. Once the operatives had room to work in, and the hope of homes of their own to go to when work was over, Amherst was willing to trust to time for the satisfaction of their other needs. He believed that a sounder understanding of these needs would develop on both sides the moment the employers proved their good faith by the deliberate and permanent sacrifice of excessive gain to the well-being of the employed; and once the two had learned to regard each other not as antagonists but as collaborators, a long step would have been taken toward a readjustment of the whole industrial relation. In regard to general and distant results, Amherst tried not to be too sanguine, even in his own thoughts. His aim was to remedy the abuse nearest at hand, in the hope of thus getting gradually closer to the central evil; and, had his action been unhampered, he would still have preferred the longer and more circuitous path of practical experiment to the sweeping adoption of a new industrial system.

But his demands, moderate as they were, assumed in his hearers the consciousness of a moral claim superior to the obligation of making one's business "pay"; and it was the futility of this assumption that chilled the arguments on his lips, since in the orthodox creed of the business world it was a weakness and not a strength to be content with five per cent where ten was obtainable. Business was one thing, philanthropy another; and the enthusiasts who tried combining them were usually reduced, after a brief flight, to paying fifty cents on the dollar, and handing over their stock to a promoter presumably unhampered by humanitarian ideals.

Amherst knew that this was the answer with which his plea would be met; knew, moreover, that the plea was given a hearing simply because his judges deemed it so pitiably easy to refute. But the knowledge, once he had begun to speak, fanned his argument to a white heat of pleading, since, with failure so plainly ahead, small concessions and compromises were not worth making. Reason would be wasted on all; but eloquence might at least prevail with Bessy....

* * * * *

When, late that night, he went upstairs after long pacings of the garden, he was surprised to see a light in her room. She was not given to midnight study, and fearing that she might be ill he knocked at her door. There was no answer, and after a short pause he turned the handle and entered.

In the great canopied Westmore couch, her arms flung upward and her hands clasped beneath her head, she lay staring fretfully at the globe of electric light which hung from the centre of the embossed and gilded ceiling. Seen thus, with the soft curves of throat and arms revealed, and her face childishly set in a cloud of loosened hair, she looked no older than Cicely--and, like Cicely, inaccessible to grown-up arguments and the stronger logic of experience.

It was a trick of hers, in such moods, to ignore any attempt to attract her notice; and Amherst was prepared for her remaining motionless as he paused on the threshold and then advanced toward the middle of the room. There had been a time when he would have been exasperated by her pretense of not seeing him, but a deep weariness of spirit now dulled him to these surface pricks.

"I was afraid you were not well when I saw the light burning," he began.

"Thank you--I am quite well," she answered in a colourless voice, without turning her head.

"Shall I put it out, then? You can't sleep with such a glare in your eyes."

"I should not sleep at any rate; and I hate to lie awake in the dark."

"Why shouldn't you sleep?" He moved nearer, looking down compassionately on her perturbed face and struggling lips.

She lay silent a moment; then she faltered out: "B--because I'm so unhappy!"

The pretense of indifference was swept away by a gush of childish sobs as she flung over on her side and buried her face in the embroidered pillows.

Amherst, bending down, laid a quieting hand on her shoulder. "Bessy----"

She sobbed on.

He seated himself silently in the arm-chair beside the bed, and kept his soothing hold on her shoulder. The time had come when he went through all these accustomed acts of pacification as mechanically as a nurse soothing a fretful child. And once he had thought her weeping eloquent! He looked about him at the spacious room, with its heavy hangings of damask and the thick velvet carpet which stifled his steps. Everywhere were the graceful tokens of her presence--the vast lace-draped toilet-table strewn with silver and crystal, the embroidered muslin cushions heaped on the lounge, the little rose-lined slippers she had just put off, the lace wrapper, with a scent of violets in its folds, which he had pushed aside when he sat down beside her; and he remembered how full of a mysterious and intimate charm these things had once appeared to him. It was characteristic that the remembrance made him more patient with her now. Perhaps, after all, it was his failure that she was crying over....

"Don't be unhappy. You decided as seemed best to you," he said.

She pressed her handkerchief against her lips, still keeping her head averted. "But I hate all these arguments and disputes. Why should you unsettle everything?" she murmured.

His mother's words! Involuntarily he removed his hand from her shoulder, though he still remained seated by the bed.

"You are right. I see the uselessness of it," he assented, with an uncontrollable note of irony.

She turned her head at the tone, and fixed her plaintive brimming eyes on him. "You _are_ angry with me!"

"Was that troubling you?" He leaned forward again, with compassion in his face. _Sancta simplicitas!_ was the thought within him.

"I am not angry," he went on; "be reasonable and try to sleep."

She started upright, the light masses of her hair floating about her like silken sea-weed lifted on an invisible tide. "Don't talk like that! I can't endure to be humoured like a baby. I am unhappy because I can't see why all these wretched questions should be dragged into our life. I hate to have you always disagreeing with Mr. Tredegar, who is so clever and has so much experience; and yet I hate to see you give way to him, because that makes it appear as if...as if...."

"He didn't care a straw for my ideas?" Amherst smiled. "Well, he doesn't--and I never dreamed of making him. So don't worry about that either."

"You never dreamed of making him care for your ideas? But then why do you----"

"Why do I go on setting them forth at such great length?" Amherst smiled again. "To convince you--that's my only ambition."

She stared at him, shaking her head back to toss a loose lock from her puzzled eyes. A tear still shone on her lashes, but with the motion it fell and trembled down her cheek.

"To convince _me_? But you know I am so ignorant of such things."

"Most women are."

"I never pretended to understand anything about--economics, or whatever you call it."

"No."

"Then how----"

He turned and looked at her gently. "I thought you might have begun to understand something about _me_."

"About you?" The colour flowered softly under her clear skin.

"About what my ideas on such subjects were likely to be worth--judging from what you know of me in other respects." He paused and glanced away from her. "Well," he concluded deliberately, "I suppose I've had my answer tonight."

"Oh, John----!"

He rose and wandered across the room, pausing a moment to finger absently the trinkets on the dressing-table. The act recalled with a curious vividness certain dulled sensations of their first days together, when to handle and examine these frail little accessories of her toilet had been part of the wonder and amusement of his new existence. He could still hear her laugh as she leaned over him, watching his mystified look in the glass, till their reflected eyes met there and drew down her lips to his. He laid down the fragrant powder-puff he had been turning slowly between his fingers, and moved back toward the bed. In the interval he had reached a decision.

"Well--isn't it natural that I should think so?" he began again, as he stood beside her. "When we married I never expected you to care or know much about economics. It isn't a quality a man usually chooses his wife for. But I had a fancy--perhaps it shows my conceit--that when we had lived together a year or two, and you'd found out what kind of a fellow I was in other ways--ways any woman can judge of--I had a fancy that you might take my opinions on faith when it came to my own special business--the thing I'm generally supposed to know about."

He knew that he was touching a sensitive chord, for Bessy had to the full her sex's pride of possessorship. He was human and faulty till others criticized him--then he became a god. But in this case a conflicting influence restrained her from complete response to his appeal.

"I _do_ feel sure you know--about the treatment of the hands and all that; but you said yourself once--the first time we ever talked about Westmore--that the business part was different----"

Here it was again, the ancient ineradicable belief in the separable body and soul! Even an industrial organization was supposed to be subject to the old theological distinction, and Bessy was ready to co-operate with her husband in the emancipation of Westmore's spiritual part if only its body remained under the law.

Amherst controlled his impatience, as it was always easy for him to do when he had fixed on a definite line of conduct.

"It was my situation that was different; not what you call the business part. That is inextricably bound up with the treatment of the hands. If I am to have anything to do with the mills now I can deal with them only as your representative; and as such I am bound to take in the whole question."

Bessy's face clouded: was he going into it all again? But he read her look and went on reassuringly: "That was what I meant by saying that I hoped you would take me on faith. If I want the welfare of Westmore it's above all, I believe, because I want Westmore to see you as _I_ do--as the dispenser of happiness, who could not endure to benefit by any wrong or injustice to others."

"Of course, of course I don't want to do them injustice!"

"Well, then----"

He had seated himself beside her again, clasping in his the hand with which she was fretting the lace-edged sheet. He felt her restless fingers surrender slowly, and her eyes turned to him in appeal.

"But I care for what people say of you too! And you know--it's horrid, but one must consider it--if they say you're spending my money imprudently...." The blood rose to her neck and face. "I don't mind for myself...even if I have to give up as many things as papa and Mr. Tredegar think...but there is Cicely...and if people said...."

"If people said I was spending Cicely's money on improving the condition of the people to whose work she will some day owe all her wealth--" Amherst paused: "Well, I would rather hear that said of me than any other thing I can think of, except one."

"Except what?"

"That I was doing it with her mother's help and approval."

She drew a long tremulous sigh: he knew it was always a relief to her to have him assert himself strongly. But a residue of resistance still clouded her mind.

"I should always want to help you, of course; but if Mr. Tredegar and Halford Gaines think your plan unbusinesslike----"

"Mr. Tredegar and Halford Gaines are certain to think it so. And that is why I said, just now, that it comes, in the end, to your choosing between us; taking them on experience or taking me on faith."

She looked at him wistfully. "Of course I should expect to give up things.... You wouldn't want me to live here?"

"I should not ask you to," he said, half-smiling.

"I suppose there would be a good many things we couldn't do----"

"You would certainly have less money for a number of years; after that, I believe you would have more rather than less; but I should not want you to think that, beyond a reasonable point, the prosperity of the mills was ever to be measured by your dividends."

"No." She leaned back wearily among the pillows. "I suppose, for instance, we should have to give up Europe this summer----?"

Here at last was the bottom of her thought! It was always on the immediate pleasure that her soul hung: she had not enough imagination to look beyond, even in the projecting of her own desires. And it was on his knowledge of this limitation that Amherst had deliberately built.

"I don't see how you could go to Europe," he said.

"The doctor thinks I need it," she faltered.

"In that case, of course--" He stood up, not abruptly, or with any show of irritation, but as if accepting this as her final answer. "What you need most, in the meantime, is a little sleep," he said. "I will tell your maid not to disturb you in the morning." He had returned to his soothing way of speech, as though definitely resigned to the inutility of farther argument. "And I will say goodbye now," he continued, "because I shall probably take an early train, before you wake----"

She sat up with a start. "An early train? Why, where are you going?"

"I must go to Chicago some time this month, and as I shall not be wanted here tomorrow I might as well run out there at once, and join you next week at Lynbrook."

Bessy had grown pale. "But I don't understand----"

Their eyes met. "Can't you understand that I am human enough to prefer, under the circumstances, not being present at tomorrow's meeting?" he said with a dry laugh.

She sank back with a moan of discouragement, turning her face away as he began to move toward his room.

"Shall I put the light out?" he asked, pausing with his hand on the electric button.

"Yes, please."

He pushed in the button and walked on, guided through the obscurity by the line of light under his door. As he reached the threshold he heard a little choking cry.

"John--oh, John!"

He paused.

"I can't _bear_ it!" The sobs increased.

"Bear what?"

"That you should hate me----"

"Don't be foolish," he said, groping for his door-handle.

"But you do hate me--and I deserve it!"

"Nonsense, dear. Try to sleep."

"I can't sleep till you've forgiven me. Say you don't hate me! I'll do anything...only say you don't hate me!"

He stood still a moment, thinking; then he turned back, and made his way across the room to her side. As he sat down beside her, he felt her arms reach for his neck and her wet face press itself against his cheek.

"I'll do anything..." she sobbed; and in the darkness he held her to him and hated his victory.

XIII

MRS. ANSELL was engaged in what she called picking up threads. She had been abroad for the summer--had, in, fact, transferred herself but a few hours earlier from her returning steamer to the little station at Lynbrook--and was now, in the bright September afternoon, which left her in sole possession of the terrace of Lynbrook House, using that pleasant eminence as a point of observation from which to gather up some of the loose ends of history dropped at her departure.

It might have been thought that the actual scene out-spread below her--the descending gardens, the tennis-courts, the farm-lands sloping away to the blue sea-like shimmer of the Hempstead plains--offered, at the moment, little material for her purpose; but that was to view them with a superficial eye. Mrs. Ansell's trained gaze was, for example, greatly enlightened by the fact that the tennis-courts were fringed by a group of people indolently watchful of the figures agitating themselves about the nets; and that, as she turned her head toward the entrance avenue, the receding view of a station omnibus, followed by a luggage-cart, announced that more guests were to be added to those who had almost taxed to its limits the expansibility of the luncheon-table.

All this, to the initiated eye, was full of suggestion; but its significance was as nothing to that presented by the approach of two figures which, as Mrs. Ansell watched, detached themselves from the cluster about the tennis-ground and struck, obliquely and at a desultory pace, across the lawn toward the terrace. The figures--those of a slight young man with stooping shoulders, and of a lady equally youthful but slenderly erect--moved forward in absorbed communion, as if unconscious of their surroundings and indefinite as to their direction, till, on the brink of the wide grass terrace just below their observer's parapet, they paused a moment and faced each other in closer speech. This interchange of words, though brief in measure of time, lasted long enough to add a vivid strand to Mrs. Ansell's thickening skein; then, on a gesture of the lady's, and without signs of formal leave-taking, the young man struck into a path which regained the entrance avenue, while his companion, quickening her pace, crossed the grass terrace and mounted the wide stone steps sweeping up to the house.

These brought her out on the upper terrace a few yards from Mrs. Ansell's post, and exposed her, unprepared, to the full beam of welcome which that lady's rapid advance threw like a searchlight across her path.

"Dear Miss Brent! I was just wondering how it was that I hadn't seen you before." Mrs. Ansell, as she spoke, drew the girl's hand into a long soft clasp which served to keep them confronted while she delicately groped for whatever thread the encounter seemed to proffer.

Justine made no attempt to evade the scrutiny to which she found herself exposed; she merely released her hand by a movement instinctively evasive of the mechanical endearment, explaining, with a smile that softened the gesture: "I was out with Cicely when you arrived. We've just come in."

"The dear child! I haven't seen her either." Mrs. Ansell continued to bestow upon the speaker's clear dark face an intensity of attention in which, for the moment, Cicely had no perceptible share. "I hear you are teaching her botany, and all kinds of wonderful things."

Justine smiled again. "I am trying to teach her to wonder: that is the hardest faculty to cultivate in the modern child."

"Yes--I suppose so; in myself," Mrs. Ansell admitted with a responsive brightness, "I find it develops with age. The world is a remarkable place." She threw this off absently, as though leaving Miss Brent to apply it either to the inorganic phenomena with which Cicely was supposed to be occupied, or to those subtler manifestations that engaged her own attention.

"It's a great thing," she continued, "for Bessy to have had your help--for Cicely, and for herself too. There is so much that I want you to tell me about her. As an old friend I want the benefit of your fresher eye."

"About Bessy?" Justine hesitated, letting her glance drift to the distant group still anchored about the tennis-nets. "Don't you find her looking better?"

"Than when I left? So much so that I was unduly disturbed, just now, by seeing that clever little doctor--it _was_ he, wasn't it, who came up the lawn with you?"

"Dr. Wyant? Yes." Miss Brent hesitated again. "But he merely called--with a message."

"Not professionally? _Tant mieux!_ The truth is, I was anxious about Bessy when I left--I thought she ought to have gone abroad for a change. But, as it turns out, her little excursion with you did as well."

"I think she only needed rest. Perhaps her six weeks in the Adirondacks were better than Europe."

"Ah, under _your_ care--that made them better!" Mrs. Ansell in turn hesitated, the lines of her face melting and changing as if a rapid stage-hand had shifted them. When she spoke again they were as open as a public square, but also as destitute of personal significance, as flat and smooth as the painted drop before the real scene it hides.

"I have always thought that Bessy, for all her health and activity, needs as much care as Cicely--the kind of care a clever friend can give. She is so wasteful of her strength and her nerves, and so unwilling to listen to reason. Poor Dick Westmore watched over her as if she were a baby; but perhaps Mr. Amherst, who must have been used to such a different type of woman, doesn't realize...and then he's so little here...." The drop was lit up by a smile that seemed to make it more impenetrable. "As an old friend I can't help telling you how much I hope she is to have you with her for a long time--a long, long time."

Miss Brent bent her head in slight acknowledgment of the tribute. "Oh, soon she will not need any care----"

"My dear Miss Brent, she will always need it!" Mrs. Ansell made a movement inviting the young girl to share the bench from which, at the latter's approach, she had risen. "But perhaps there is not enough in such a life to satisfy your professional energies."

She seated herself, and after an imperceptible pause Justine sank into the seat beside her. "I am very glad, just now, to give my energies a holiday," she said, leaning back with a little sigh of retrospective weariness.

"You are tired too? Bessy wrote me you had been quite used up by a trying case after we saw you at Hanaford."

Miss Brent smiled. "When a nurse is fit for work she calls a trying case a 'beautiful' one."

"But meanwhile--?" Mrs. Ansell shone on her with elder-sisterly solicitude. "Meanwhile, why not stay on with Cicely--above all, with Bessy? Surely she's a 'beautiful' case too."

"Isn't she?" Justine laughingly agreed.

"And if you want to be tried--" Mrs. Ansell swept the scene with a slight lift of her philosophic shoulders--"you'll find there are trials enough everywhere."

Her companion started up with a glance at the small watch on her breast. "One of them is that it's already after four, and that I must see that tea is sent down to the tennis-ground, and the new arrivals looked after."

"I saw the omnibus on its way to the station. Are many more people coming?"

"Five or six, I believe. The house is usually full for Sunday."

Mrs. Ansell made a slight motion to detain her. "And when is Mr. Amherst expected?"

Miss Brent's pale cheek seemed to take on a darker tone of ivory, and her glance dropped from her companion's face to the vivid stretch of gardens at their feet. "Bessy has not told me," she said.

"Ah--" the older woman rejoined, looking also toward the gardens, as if to intercept Miss Brent's glance in its flight. The latter stood still a moment, with the appearance of not wishing to evade whatever else her companion might have to say; then she moved away, entering the house by one window just as Mr. Langhope emerged from it by another.

The sound of his stick tapping across the bricks roused Mrs. Ansell from her musings, but she showed her sense of his presence simply by returning to the bench she had just left; and accepting this mute invitation, Mr. Langhope crossed the terrace and seated himself at her side.

When he had done so they continued to look at each other without speaking, after the manner of old friends possessed of occult means of communication; and as the result of this inward colloquy Mr. Langhope at length said: "Well, what do you make of it?"

"What do _you_?" she rejoined, turning full upon him a face so released from its usual defences and disguises that it looked at once older and more simple than the countenance she presented to the world.

Mr. Langhope waved a deprecating hand. "I want your fresher impressions."

"That's what I just now said to Miss Brent."

"You've been talking to Miss Brent?"

"Only a flying word--she had to go and look after the new arrivals."

Mr. Langhope's attention deepened. "Well, what did you say to her?"

"Wouldn't you rather hear what she said to _me_?"

He smiled. "A good cross-examiner always gets the answers he wants. Let me hear your side, and I shall know hers."

"I should say that applied only to stupid cross-examiners; or to those who have stupid subjects to deal with. And Miss Brent is not stupid, you know."

"Far from it! What else do you make out?"

"I make out that she's in possession."

"Here?"

"Don't look startled. Do you dislike her?"

"Heaven forbid--with those eyes! She has a wit of her own, too--and she certainly makes things easier for Bessy."

"She guards her carefully, at any rate. I could find out nothing."

"About Bessy?"

"About the general situation."

"Including Miss Brent?"

Mrs. Ansell smiled faintly. "I made one little discovery about her."

"Well?"

"She's intimate with the new doctor."

"Wyant?" Mr. Langhope's interest dropped. "What of that? I believe she knew him before."

"I daresay. It's of no special importance, except as giving us a possible clue to her character. She strikes me as interesting and mysterious."

Mr. Langhope smiled. "The things your imagination does for you!"

"It helps me to see that we may find Miss Brent useful as a friend."

"A friend?"

"An ally." She paused, as if searching for a word. "She may restore the equilibrium."

Mr. Langhope's handsome face darkened. "Open Bessy's eyes to Amherst? Damn him!" he said quietly.

Mrs. Ansell let the imprecation pass. "When was he last here?" she asked.

"Five or six weeks ago--for one night. His only visit since she came back from the Adirondacks."

"What do you think his motive is? He must know what he risks in losing his hold on Bessy."

"His motive? With your eye for them, can you ask? A devouring ambition, that's all! Haven't you noticed that, in all except the biggest minds, ambition takes the form of wanting to command where one has had to obey? Amherst has been made to toe the line at Westmore, and now he wants Truscomb--yes, and Halford Gaines, too!--to do the same. That's the secret of his servant-of-the-people pose--gad, I believe it's the whole secret of his marriage! He's devouring my daughter's substance to pay off an old score against the mills. He'll never rest till he has Truscomb out, and some creature of his own in command--and then, _vogue la galere_! If it were women, now," Mr. Langhope summed up impatiently, "one could understand it, at his age, and with that damned romantic head--but to be put aside for a lot of low mongrelly socialist mill-hands--ah, my poor girl--my poor girl!"

Mrs. Ansell mused. "You didn't write me that things were so bad. There's been no actual quarrel?" she asked.

"How can there be, when the poor child does all he wants? He's simply too busy to come and thank her!"

"Too busy at Hanaford?"

"So he says. Introducing the golden age at Westmore--it's likely to be the age of copper at Lynbrook."

Mrs. Ansell drew a meditative breath. "I was thinking of that. I understood that Bessy would have to retrench while the changes at Westmore were going on."

"Well--didn't she give up Europe, and cable over to countermand her new motor?"

"But the life here! This mob of people! Miss Brent tells me the house is full for every week-end."

"Would you have my daughter cut off from all her friends?"

Mrs. Ansell met this promptly. "From some of the new ones, at any rate! Have you heard who has just arrived?"

Mr. Langhope's hesitation showed a tinge of embarrassment. "I'm not sure--some one has always just arrived."

"Well, the Fenton Carburys, then!" Mrs. Ansell left it to her tone to annotate the announcement.

Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. "Are they likely to be an exceptionally costly pleasure?"

"If you're trying to prove that I haven't kept to the point--I can assure you that I'm well within it!"

"But since the good Blanche has got her divorce and married Carbury, wherein do they differ from other week-end automata?"

"Because most divorced women marry again to be respectable."

Mr. Langhope smiled faintly. "Yes--that's their punishment. But it would be too dull for Blanche."

"Precisely. _She_ married again to see Ned Bowfort!"

"Ah--that may yet be hers!"

Mrs. Ansell sighed at his perversity. "Meanwhile, she's brought him here, and it is unnatural to see Bessy lending herself to such combinations."

"You're corrupted by a glimpse of the old societies. Here Bowfort and Carbury are simply hands at bridge."

"Old hands at it--yes! And the bridge is another point: Bessy never used to play for money."

"Well, she may make something, and offset her husband's prodigalities."

"There again--with this _train de vie_, how on earth are both ends to meet?"

Mr. Langhope grown suddenly grave, struck his cane resoundingly on the terrace. "Westmore and Lynbrook? I don't want them to--I want them to get farther and farther apart!"

She cast on him a look of startled divination. "You want Bessy to go on spending too much money?"

"How can I help it if it costs?"

"If what costs--?" She stopped, her eyes still wide; then their glances crossed, and she exclaimed: "If your scheme costs? It _is_ your scheme, then?"

He shrugged his shoulders again. "It's a passive attitude----"

"Ah, the deepest plans are that!" Mr. Langhope uttered no protest, and she continued to piece her conjectures together. "But you expect it to lead up to something active. Do you want a rupture?"

"I want him brought back to his senses."

"Do you think that will bring him back to _her_?"

"Where the devil else will he have to go?"

Mrs. Ansell's eyes dropped toward the gardens, across which desultory knots of people were straggling back from the ended tennis-match. "Ah, here they all come," she said, rising with a half-sigh; and as she stood watching the advance of the brightly-tinted groups she added slowly: "It's ingenious--but you don't understand him."

Mr. Langhope stroked his moustache. "Perhaps not," he assented thoughtfully. "But suppose we go in before they join us? I want to show you a set of Ming I picked up the other day for Bessy. I flatter myself I _do_ understand Ming."

XIV

JUSTINE BRENT, her household duties discharged, had gone upstairs to her room, a little turret chamber projecting above the wide terrace below, from which the sounds of lively intercourse now rose increasingly to her window.