Half-way up the slope to the house they met.Half-way up the slope to the house they met.
She glanced away from him at the busy throng on the ice and at the other black cluster above the coasting-slide.
"How they're enjoying it!" she murmured. "What a pity it was never done before! And who will keep it up when you're gone?"
"You," he answered, meeting her eyes again; and as she coloured a little under his look he went on quickly: "Will you come over and look at the coasting? The time is almost up. One more slide and they'll be packing off to supper."
She nodded "yes," and they walked in silence over the white lawn, criss-crossed with tramplings of happy feet, to the ridge from which the coasters started on their run. Amherst's object in turning the talk had been to gain a moment's respite. He could not bear to waste his perfect hour in futile explanations: he wanted to keep it undisturbed by any thought of the future. And the same feeling seemed to possess his companion, for she did not speak again till they reached the knoll where the boys were gathered.
A sled packed with them hung on the brink: with a last shout it was off, dipping down the incline with the long curved flight of a swallow, flashing across the wide meadow at the base of the hill, and tossed upward againby its own impetus, till it vanished in the dark rim of wood on the opposite height. The lads waiting on the knoll sang out for joy, and Bessy clapped her hands and joined with them.
"What fun! I wish I'd brought Cicely! I've not coasted for years," she laughed out, as the second detachment of boys heaped themselves on another sled and shot down. Amherst looked at her with a smile. He saw that every other feeling had vanished in the exhilaration of watching the flight of the sleds. She had forgotten why she had come—forgotten her distress at his dismissal—forgotten everything but the spell of the long white slope, and the tingle of cold in her veins.
"Shall we go down? Should you like it?" he asked, feeling no resentment under the heightened glow of his pulses.
"Oh, do take me—I shall love it!" Her eyes shone like a child's—she might have been a lovelier embodiment of the shouting boyhood about them.
The first band of coasters, sled at heels, had by this time already covered a third of the homeward stretch; but Amherst was too impatient to wait. Plunging down to the meadow he caught up the sled-rope, and raced back with the pack of rejoicing youth in his wake. The sharp climb up the hill seemed to fill his lungs with flame: his whole body burned with a strange intensity of life. As he reached the top, a distant bell rang across the fields from Westmore, and the boys began to snatch up their coats and mufflers.
"Be off with you—I'll look after the sleds," Amherst called to them as they dispersed; then he turned for a moment to see that the skaters below were also heeding the summons.
A cold pallor lay on the river-banks and on the low meadow beneath the knoll; but the woodland opposite stood black against scarlet vapours that ravelled off in sheer light toward a sky hung with an icy moon.
Amherst drew up the sled and held it steady while Bessy, seating herself, tucked her furs close with little breaks of laughter; then he placed himself in front.
"Ready?" he cried over his shoulder, and "Ready!" she called back.
Their craft quivered under them, hanging an instant over the long stretch of whiteness below; the level sun dazzled their eyes, and the first plunge seemed to dash them down into darkness. Amherst heard a cry of glee behind him; then all sounds were lost in the whistle of air humming by like the flight of a million arrows. They had dropped below the sunset and were tearing through the clear nether twilight of the descent; then, with a bound, the sled met the level, and shot away across the meadow toward the opposite height. It seemed to Amherst as though his body had beenleft behind, and only the spirit in him rode the wild blue currents of galloping air; but as the sled's rush began to slacken with the strain of the last ascent he was recalled to himself by the touch of the breathing warmth at his back. Bessy had put out a hand to steady herself, and as she leaned forward, gripping his arm, a flying end of her furs swept his face. There was a delicious pang in being thus caught back to life; and as the sled stopped, and he sprang to his feet, he still glowed with the sensation. Bessy too was under the spell. In the dusk of the beech-grove where they had landed, he could barely distinguish her features; but her eyes shone on him, and he heard her quick breathing as he stooped to help her to her feet.
"Oh, how beautiful—it's the only thing better than a good gallop!"
She leaned against a tree-bole, panting a little, and loosening her furs.
"What a pity it's too dark to begin again!" she sighed, looking about her through the dim weaving of leafless boughs.
"It's not so dark in the open—we might have one more," he proposed; but she shook her head, seized by a new whim.
"It's so still and delicious in here—did you hear the snow fall when that squirrel jumped across to the pine?" She tilted her head, narrowing her lids as she peeredupward. "There he is! One gets used to the light.... Look! See his little eyes shining down at us!"
As Amherst looked where she pointed, the squirrel leapt to another tree, and they stole on after him through the hushed wood, guided by his grey flashes in the dimness. Here and there, in a break of the snow, they trod on a bed of wet leaves that gave out a breath of hidden life, or a hemlock twig dashed its spicy scent into their faces. As they grew used to the twilight their eyes began to distinguish countless delicate gradations of tint: cold mottlings of grey-black boles against the snow, wet russets of drifted beech-leaves, a distant network of mauve twigs melting into the woodland haze. And in the silence just such fine gradations of sound became audible: the soft drop of loosened snow-lumps, a stir of startled wings, the creak of a dead branch, somewhere far off in darkness.
They walked on, still in silence, as though they had entered the glade of an enchanted forest and were powerless to turn back or to break the hush with a word. They made no pretense of following the squirrel any longer; he had flashed away to a high tree-top, from which his ironical chatter pattered down on their unheeding ears. Amherst's sensations were not of that highest order of happiness where mind and heart mingle their elements in the strong draught of life: it was a languid fume that stole through him from the cup athis lips. But after the sense of defeat and failure which the last weeks had brought, the reaction was too exquisite to be analyzed. All he asked of the moment was its immediate sweetness....
They had reached the brink of a rocky glen where a little brook still sent its thread of sound through mufflings of ice and huddled branches. Bessy stood still a moment, bending her head to the sweet cold tinkle; then she moved away and said slowly: "We must go back."
As they turned to retrace their steps a yellow line of light through the tree-trunks showed them that they had not, after all, gone very deep into the wood. A few minutes' walk would restore them to the lingering daylight, and on the farther side of the meadow stood the sleigh which was to carry Bessy back to Hanaford. A sudden sense of the evanescence of the moment roused Amherst from his absorption. Before the next change in the fading light he would be back again among the ugly realities of life. Did she, too, hate to return to them? Or why else did she walk so slowly—why did she seem as much afraid as himself to break the silence that held them in its magic circle?
A dead pine-branch caught in the edge of her skirt, and she stood still while Amherst bent down to release her. As she turned to help him he looked up with a smile.
"The wood doesn't want to let you go," he said.
She made no reply, and he added, rising: "But you'll come back to it—you'll come back often, I hope."
He could not see her face in the dimness, but her voice trembled a little as she answered: "I will do what you tell me—but I shall be alone—against all the others: they don't understand."
The simplicity, the helplessness, of the avowal, appealed to him not as a weakness but as a grace. He understood what she was really saying: "How can you desert me? How can you put this great responsibility on me, and then leave me to bear it alone?" and in the light of her unuttered appeal his action seemed almost like cruelty. Why had he opened her eyes to wrongs she had no strength to redress without his aid?
He could only answer, as he walked beside her toward the edge of the wood: "You will not be alone—in time you will make the others understand; in time they will be with you."
"Ah, you don't believe that!" she exclaimed, pausing suddenly, and speaking with an intensity of reproach that amazed him.
"I hope it, at any rate," he rejoined, pausing also. "And I'm sure that if you will come here oftener—if you'll really live among your people——"
"How can you say that, when you're deserting them?" she broke in, with a feminine excess of inconsequence that fairly dashed the words from his lips.
"Deserting them? Don't you understand——?"
"I understand that you've made Mr. Gaines and Truscomb angry—yes; but if I should insist on your staying——"
Amherst felt the blood rush to his forehead. "No—no, it's not possible!" he exclaimed, with a vehemence addressed more to himself than to her.
"Then what will happen at the mills?"
"Oh, some one else will be found—the new ideas are stirring everywhere. And if you'll only come back here, and help my successor——"
"Do you think they are likely to choose any one else with your ideas?" she interposed with unexpected acuteness; and after a short silence he answered: "Not immediately, perhaps; but in time—in time there will be improvements."
"As if the poor people could wait! Oh, it's cruel, cruel of you to go!"
Her voice broke in a throb of entreaty that went to his inmost fibres.
"You don't understand. It's impossible in the present state of things that I should do any good by staying."
"Then you refuse? Even if I were to insist on their asking you to stay, you would still refuse?" she persisted.
"Yes—I should still refuse."
She made no answer, but moved a few steps nearerto the edge of the wood. The meadow was just below them now, and the sleigh in plain sight on the height beyond. Their steps made no sound on the sodden drifts underfoot, and in the silence he thought he heard a catch in her breathing. It was enough to make the brimming moment overflow. He stood still before her and bent his head to hers.
"Bessy!" he said, with sudden vehemence.
She did not speak or move, but in the quickened state of his perceptions he became aware that she was silently weeping. The gathering darkness under the trees enveloped them. It absorbed her outline into the shadowy background of the wood, from which her face emerged in a faint spot of pallor; and the same obscurity seemed to envelop his faculties, merging the hard facts of life in a blur of feeling in which the distinctest impression was the sweet sense of her tears.
"Bessy!" he exclaimed again; and as he drew a step nearer he felt her yield to him, and bury her sobs against his arm.
"But, Justine——"
Mrs. Harry Dressel, seated in the June freshness of her Oak Street drawing-room, and harmonizing by her high lights and hard edges with the white-and-gold angularities of the best furniture, cast a rebuking eye on her friend Miss Brent, who stood arranging in a glass bowl the handful of roses she had just brought in from the garden.
Mrs. Dressel's intonation made it clear that the entrance of Miss Brent had been the signal for renewing an argument which the latter had perhaps left the room to escape.
"When you were here three years ago, Justine, I could understand your not wanting to go out, because you were in mourning for your mother—and besides, you'd volunteered for that bad surgical case in the Hope Hospital. But now that you've come back for a rest and a change I can't imagine why you persist in shutting yourself up—unless, of course," she concluded, in a higher key of reproach, "it's because you think so little of Hanaford society——"
Justine Brent, putting the last rose in place, turned from her task with a protesting gesture.
"My dear Effie, who am I to think little of any society, when I belong to none?" She passed a last light touch over the flowers, and crossing the room, brushed her friend's hand with the same caressing gesture.
Mrs. Dressel met it with an unrelenting turn of her plump shoulder, murmuring: "Oh, if you takethattone!" And on Miss Brent's gaily rejoining: "Isn't it better than to have other people take it for me?" she replied, with an air of affront that expressed itself in a ruffling of her whole pretty person: "If you'll excuse my saying so, Justine, the fact that you are staying withmewould be enough to make you welcome anywhere in Hanaford!"
"I'm sure of it, dear; so sure that my horrid pride rather resents being floated in on the high tide of such overwhelming credentials."
Mrs. Dressel glanced up doubtfully at the dark face laughing down on her. Though she was president of the Maplewood Avenue Book-club, and habitually figured in the society column of the "Banner" as one of the intellectual leaders of Hanaford, there were moments when her self-confidence trembled before Justine's light sallies. It was absurd, of course, given the relative situations of the two; and Mrs. Dressel, behindher friend's back, was quickly reassured by the thought that Justine was only a hospital nurse, who had to work for her living, and had really never "been anywhere"; but when Miss Brent's verbal arrows were flying, it seemed somehow of more immediate consequence that she was fairly well-connected, and lived in New York. No one placed a higher value on the abstract qualities of wit and irony than Mrs. Dressel; the difficulty was that she never quite knew when Justine's retorts were loaded, or when her own susceptibilities were the target aimed at; and between her desire to appear to take the joke, and the fear of being ridiculed without knowing it, her pretty face often presented an interesting study in perplexity. As usual, she now took refuge in bringing the talk back to a personal issue.
"I can't imagine," she said, "why you won't go to the Gaines's garden-party. It's always the most brilliant affair of the season; and this year, with the John Amhersts here, and all their party—that fascinating Mrs. Eustace Ansell, and Mrs. Amherst's father, old Mr. Langhope, who is quite as quick and clever asyouare—you certainly can't accuse us of being dull and provincial!"
Miss Brent smiled. "As far as I can remember, Effie, it is always you who accuse others of bringing that charge against Hanaford. For my part, I knowtoo little of it to have formed any opinion; but whatever it may have to offer me, I am painfully conscious of having, at present, nothing but your kind commendation to give in return."
Mrs. Dressel rose impatiently. "How absurdly you talk! You're a little thinner than usual, and I don't like those dark lines under your eyes; but Westy Gaines told me yesterday that he thought you handsomer than ever, and that it was intensely becoming to some women to look over-tired."
"It's lucky I'm one of that kind," Miss Brent rejoined, between a sigh and a laugh, "and there's every promise of my getting handsomer every day if somebody doesn't soon arrest the geometrical progression of my good looks by giving me the chance to take a year's rest!"
As she spoke, she stretched her arms above her head, with a gesture revealing the suppleness of her slim young frame, but also its tenuity of structure—the frailness of throat and shoulders, and the play of bones in the delicate neck. Justine Brent had one of those imponderable bodies that seem a mere pinch of matter shot through with light and colour. Though she did not flush easily, auroral lights ran under her clear skin, were lost in the shadows of her hair, and broke again in her eyes; and her voice seemed to shoot light too, as though her smile flashed back from her words asthey fell—all her features being so fluid and changeful that the one solid thing about her was the massing of dense black hair which clasped her face like the noble metal of some antique bust.
Mrs. Dressel's face softened at the note of weariness in the girl's voice. "Are you very tired, dear?" she asked drawing her down to a seat on the sofa.
"Yes, and no—not so much bodily, perhaps, as in spirit." Justine Brent drew her brows together, and stared moodily at the thin brown hands interwoven between Mrs. Dressel's plump fingers. Seated thus, with hollowed shoulders and brooding head, she might have figured a young sibyl bowed above some mystery of fate; but the next moment her face, inclining toward her friend's, cast off its shadows and resumed the look of a plaintive child.
"The worst of it is that I don't look forward with any interest to taking up the old drudgery again. Of course that loss of interest may be merely physical—I should call it so in a nervous patient, no doubt. But in myself it seems different—it seems to go to the roots of the world. You know it was always the imaginative side of my work that helped me over the ugly details—the pity and beauty that disinfected the physical horror; but now that feeling is lost, and only the mortal disgust remains. Oh, Effie, I don't want to be a ministering angel any more—I want to be uncertain, coyand hard to please. I want something dazzling and unaccountable to happen to me—something new and unlived and indescribable!"
She snatched herself with a laugh from the bewildered Effie, and flinging up her arms again, spun on a light heel across the polished floor.
"Well, then," murmured Mrs. Dressel with gentle obstinacy, "I can't see why in the world you won't go to the Gaines's garden-party!" And caught in the whirlwind of her friend's incomprehensible mirth, she still persisted, as she ducked her blonde head to it: "If you'll only let me lend you my dress with the Irish lace, you'll look smarter than anybody there...."
Before her toilet mirror, an hour later, Justine Brent seemed in a way to fulfill Mrs. Dressel's prediction. So mirror-like herself, she could no more help reflecting the happy effect of a bow or a feather than the subtler influence of word and look; and her face and figure were so new to the advantages of dress that, at four-and-twenty, she still produced the effect of a young girl in her first "good" frock. In Mrs. Dressel's festal raiment, which her dark tints subdued to a quiet elegance, she was like the golden core of a pale rose illuminating and scenting its petals.
Three years of solitary life, following on a youth of confidential intimacy with the mother she had lost, hadproduced in her the quaint habit of half-loud soliloquy. "Fine feathers, Justine!" she laughed back at her laughing image. "You look like a phoenix risen from your ashes. But slip back into your own plumage, and you'll be no more than a little brown bird without a song!"
The luxurious suggestions of her dress, and the way her warm youth became it, drew her back to memories of a childhood nestled in beauty and gentle ways, before her handsome prodigal father had died, and her mother's face had grown pinched in the long struggle with poverty. But those memories were after all less dear to Justine than the grey years following, when, growing up, she had helped to clear a space in the wilderness for their tiny hearth-fire, when her own efforts had fed the flame and roofed it in from the weather. A great heat, kindled at that hearth, had burned in her veins, making her devour her work, lighting and warming the long cold days, and reddening the horizon through dark passages of revolt and failure; and she felt all the more deeply the chill of reaction that set in with her mother's death.
She thought she had chosen her work as a nurse in a spirit of high disinterestedness; but in the first hours of her bereavement it seemed as though only the personal aim had sustained her. For a while, after this, her sick people became to her mere bundles of disintegrating matter, and she shrank from physical pain with a distaste the deeper because, mechanically, she could not help working on to relieve it. Gradually her sound nature passed out of this morbid phase, and she took up her task with deeper pity if less exalted ardour; glad to do her part in the vast impersonal labour of easing the world's misery, but longing with all the warm instincts of youth for a special load to lift, a single hand to clasp.
Ah, it was cruel to be alive, to be young, to bubble with springs of mirth and tenderness and folly, and to live in perpetual contact with decay and pain—to look persistently into the grey face of death without having lifted even a corner of life's veil! Now and then, when she felt her youth flame through the sheath of dullness which was gradually enclosing it, she rebelled at the conditions that tied a spirit like hers to its monotonous task, while others, without a quiver of wings on their dull shoulders, or a note of music in their hearts, had the whole wide world to range through, and saw in it no more than a frightful emptiness to be shut out with tight walls of habit....
A tap on the door announced Mrs. Dressel, garbed for conquest, and bestowing on her brilliant person the last anxious touches of the artist reluctant to part from a masterpiece.
"My dear, how well you look! Iknewthat dress would be becoming!" she exclaimed, generously transferring her self-approval to Justine; and adding, as the latter moved toward her: "I wish Westy Gaines could see you now!"
"Well, he will presently," Miss Brent rejoined, ignoring the slight stress on the name.
Mrs. Dressel continued to brood on her maternally. "Justine—I wish you'd tell me! You say you hate the life you're leading now—but isn't there somebody who might——?"
"Give me another, with lace dresses in it?" Justine's slight shrug might have seemed theatrical, had it not been a part of the ceaseless dramatic play of her flexible person. "There might be, perhaps...only I'm not sure—" She broke off whimsically.
"Not sure of what?"
"That this kind of dress might not always be a little tight on the shoulders."
"Tight on the shoulders? What do you mean, Justine? My clothes simplyhangon you!"
"Oh, Effie dear, don't you remember the fable of the wings under the skin, that sprout when one meets a pair of kindred shoulders?" And, as Mrs. Dressel bent on her a brow of unenlightenment—"Well, it doesn't matter: I only meant that I've always been afraid good clothes might keep my wings from sprouting!" She turned back to the glass, giving herself a last light touch such as she had bestowed on the roses.
"And that reminds me," she continued—"how about Mr. Amherst's wings?"
"John Amherst?" Mrs. Dressel brightened into immediate attention. "Why, do you know him?"
"Not as the owner of the Westmore Mills; but I came across him as their assistant manager three years ago, at the Hope Hospital, and he was starting a very promising pair then. I wonder if they're doing as well under his new coat."
"I'm not sure that I understand you when you talk poetry," said Mrs. Dressel with less interest; "but personally I can't say I like John Amherst—and he is certainly not worthy of such a lovely woman as Mrs. Westmore. Of course she would never let any one see that she's not perfectly happy; but I'm told he has given them all a great deal of trouble by interfering in the management of the mills, and his manner is so cold and sarcastic—the truth is, I suppose he's never quite at ease in society.Herfamily have never been really reconciled to the marriage; and Westy Gaines says——"
"Ah, Westy Gaineswould," Justine interposed lightly. "But if Mrs. Amherst is really the Bessy Langhope I used to know it must be rather a struggle for the wings!"
Mrs. Dressel's flagging interest settled on the one glimpse of fact in this statement. "It's such a coincidence that you should have known her too! Was she always so perfectly fascinating? I wish I knew how she gives that look to her hair!"
Justine gathered up the lace sunshade and long gloves which her friend had lent her. "There was not much more that was genuine about her character—that was her very own, I mean—than there is about my appearance at this moment. She was always the dearest little chameleon in the world, taking everybody's colour in the most flattering way, and giving back, I must say, a most charming reflection—if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor; but when one got her by herself, with no reflections to catch, one found she hadn't any particular colour of her own. One of the girls used to say she ought to wear a tag, because she was so easily mislaid—— Now then, I'm ready!"
Justine advanced to the door, and Mrs. Dressel followed her downstairs, reflecting with pardonable complacency that one of the disadvantages of being clever was that it tempted one to say sarcastic things of other women—than which she could imagine no more crying social error.
During the drive to the garden-party, Justine's thoughts, drawn to the past by the mention of Bessy Langhope's name, reverted to the comic inconsequences of her own lot—to that persistent irrelevance of incident that had once made her compare herself to anactor always playing his part before the wrong stage-setting. Was there not, for instance, a mocking incongruity in the fact that a creature so leaping with life should have, for chief outlet, the narrow mental channel of the excellent couple between whom she was now being borne to the Gaines garden-party? All her friendships were the result of propinquity or of early association, and fate had held her imprisoned in a circle of well-to-do mediocrity, peopled by just such figures as those of the kindly and prosperous Dressels. Effie Dressel, the daughter of a cousin of Mrs. Brent's, had obscurely but safely allied herself with the heavy blond young man who was to succeed his father as President of the Union Bank, and who was already regarded by the "solid business interests" of Hanaford as possessing talents likely to carry him far in the development of the paternal fortunes. Harry Dressel's honest countenance gave no evidence of peculiar astuteness, and he was in fact rather the product of special conditions than of an irresistible bent. He had the sound Saxon love of games, and the most interesting game he had ever been taught was "business." He was a simple domestic being, and according to Hanaford standards the most obvious obligation of the husband and father was to make his family richer. If Harry Dressel had ever formulated his aims, he might have said that he wanted to be the man whom Hanaford most respected, andthat was only another way of saying, the richest man in Hanaford. Effie embraced his creed with a zeal facilitated by such evidence of its soundness as a growing income and the early prospects of a carriage. Her mother-in-law, a kind old lady with a simple unquestioning love of money, had told her on her wedding day that Harry's one object would always be to make his family proud of him; and the recent purchase of the victoria in which Justine and the Dressels were now seated was regarded by the family as a striking fulfillment of this prophecy.
In the course of her hospital work Justine had of necessity run across far different types; but from the connections thus offered she was often held back by the subtler shades of taste that civilize human intercourse. Her world, in short, had been chiefly peopled by the dull or the crude, and, hemmed in between the two, she had created for herself an inner kingdom where the fastidiousness she had to set aside in her outward relations recovered its full sway. There must be actual beings worthy of admission to this secret precinct, but hitherto they had not come her way; and the sense that they were somewhere just out of reach still gave an edge of youthful curiosity to each encounter with a new group of people.
Certainly, Mrs. Gaines's garden-party seemed an unlikely field for the exercise of such curiosity: Justine'sfew glimpses of Hanaford society had revealed it as rather a dull thick body, with a surface stimulated only by ill-advised references to the life of larger capitals; and the concentrated essence of social Hanaford was of course to be found at the Gaines entertainments. It presented itself, however, in the rich June afternoon, on the long shadows of the well-kept lawn, and among the paths of the rose-garden, in its most amiable aspect; and to Justine, wearied by habitual contact with ugliness and suffering, there was pure delight in the verdant setting of the picture, and in the light harmonious tints of the figures peopling it. If the company was dull, it was at least decorative; and poverty, misery and dirt were shut out by the placid unconsciousness of the guests as securely as by the leafy barriers of the garden.
"Ah, Mrs. Dressel, we were on the lookout for you—waiting for the curtain to rise. Your friend Miss Brent? Juliana, Mrs. Dressel's friend Miss Brent——"
Near the brilliantly-striped marquee that formed the axis of the Gaines garden-parties, Mr. Halford Gaines, a few paces from his wife and daughters, stood radiating a royal welcome on the stream of visitors pouring across the lawn. It was only to eyes perverted by a different social perspective that there could be any doubt as tothe importance of the Gaines entertainments. To Hanaford itself they were epoch-making; and if any rebellious spirit had cherished a doubt of the fact, it would have been quelled by the official majesty of Mr. Gaines's frock-coat and the comprehensive cordiality of his manner.
There were moments when New York hung like a disquieting cloud on the social horizon of Mrs. Gaines and her daughters; but to Halford Gaines Hanaford was all in all. As an exponent of the popular and patriotic "good-enough-for-me" theory he stood in high favour at the Hanaford Club, where a too-keen consciousness of the metropolis was alternately combated by easy allusion and studied omission, and where the unsettled fancies of youth were chastened and steadied by the reflection that, if Hanaford was good enough for Halford Gaines, it must offer opportunities commensurate with the largest ideas of life.
Never did Mr. Gaines's manner bear richer witness to what could be extracted from Hanaford than when he was in the act of applying to it the powerful pressure of his hospitality. The resultant essence was so bubbling with social exhilaration that, to its producer at any rate, its somewhat mixed ingredients were lost in one highly flavoured draught. Under ordinary circumstances no one discriminated more keenly than Mr. Gaines between different shades of social importance;but any one who was entertained by him was momentarily ennobled by the fact, and not all the anxious telegraphy of his wife and daughters could, for instance, recall to him that the striking young woman in Mrs. Dressel's wake was only some obscure protégée, whom it was odd of Effie to have brought, and whose presence was quite unnecessary to emphasize.
"Juliana, Miss Brent tells me she has never seen our roses. Oh, there are other roses in Hanaford, Miss Brent; I don't mean to imply that no one else attempts them; but unless you can afford to givecarte blancheto your man—and mine happens to be something of a specialist...well, if you'll come with me, I'll let them speak for themselves. I always say that if people want to know what we can do they must come and see—they'll never find out fromme!"
A more emphatic signal from his wife arrested Mr. Gaines as he was in the act of leading Miss Brent away.
"Eh?—What? The Amhersts and Mrs. Ansell? You must excuse me then, I'm afraid—but Westy shall take you. Westy, my boy, it's an ill-wind.... I want you to show this young lady our roses." And Mr. Gaines, with mingled reluctance and satisfaction, turned away to receive the most important guests of the day.
It had not needed his father's summons to draw the expert Westy to Miss Brent: he was already gravitating toward her, with the nonchalance bred of cosmopolitansuccesses, but with a directness of aim due also to his larger opportunities of comparison.
"The roses will do," he explained, as he guided her through the increasing circle of guests about his mother; and in answer to Justine's glance of enquiry: "To get you away, I mean. They're not much in themselves, you know; but everything of the governor's always begins with a capital letter."
"Oh, but these roses deserve to," Justine exclaimed, as they paused under the evergreen archway at the farther end of the lawn.
"I don't know—not if you've been in England," Westy murmured, watching furtively for the impression produced, on one who had presumably not, by the great blush of colour massed against its dusky background of clipped evergreens.
Justine smiled. "Ihavebeen—but I've been in the slums since; in horrible places that the least of those flowers would have lighted up like a lamp."
Westy's guarded glance imprudently softened. "It's the beastliest kind of a shame, your ever having had to do such work——"
"Oh,hadto?" she flashed back at him disconcertingly. "It was my choice, you know: there was a time when I couldn't live without it. Philanthropy is one of the subtlest forms of self-indulgence."
Westy met this with a vague laugh. If a chap whowas as knowing as the devildid, once in a way, indulge himself in the luxury of talking recklessly to a girl with exceptional eyes, it was rather upsetting to discover in those eyes no consciousness of the risk he had taken!
"But Iamrather tired of it now," she continued, and his look grew guarded again. After all, they were all the same—except in that particular matter of the eyes. At the thought, he risked another look, hung on the sharp edge of betrayal, and was snatched back, not by the manly instinct of self-preservation, but by some imp of mockery lurking in the depths that lured him.
He recovered his balance and took refuge in a tone of worldly ease. "I saw a chap the other day who said he knew you when you were at Saint Elizabeth's—wasn't that the name of your hospital?"
Justine assented. "One of the doctors, I suppose. Where did you meet him?"
Ah,nowshe should see! He summoned his utmost carelessness of tone. "Down on Long Island last week—I was spending Sunday with the Amhersts." He held up the glittering fact to her, and watched for the least little blink of awe; but her lids never trembled. It was a confession of social blindness which painfully negatived Mrs. Dressel's hint that she knew the Amhersts; if she had even knownofthem, she could not so fatally have missed his point.
"Long Island?" She drew her brows together in puzzled retrospection. "I wonder if it could have been Stephen Wyant? I heard he had taken over his uncle's practice somewhere near New York."
"Wyant—that's the name. He's the doctor at Clifton, the nearest town to the Amhersts' place. Little Cicely had a cold—Cicely Westmore, you know—a small cousin of mine, by the way—" he switched a rose-branch loftily out of her path, explaining, as she moved on, that Cicely was the daughter of Mrs. Amherst's first marriage to Richard Westmore. "That's the way I happened to see this Dr. Wyant. Bessy—Mrs. Amherst—asked him to stop to luncheon, after he'd seen the kid. He seems rather a discontented sort of a chap—grumbling at not having a New York practice. I should have thought he had rather a snug berth, down there at Lynbrook, with all those swells to dose."
Justine smiled. "Dr. Wyant is ambitious, and swells don't have as interesting diseases as poor people. One gets tired of giving them bread pills for imaginary ailments. But Dr. Wyant is not strong himself and I fancy a country practice is better for him than hard work in town."
"You think him clever though, do you?" Westy enquired absently. He was already bored with the subject of the Long Island doctor, and vexed at the lack of perception that led his companion to show more concern in the fortunes of a country practitioner than in the fact of his own visit to the Amhersts; but the topic was a safe one, and it was agreeable to see how her face kindled when she was interested.
Justine mused on his question. "I think he has very great promise—which he is almost certain not to fulfill," she answered with a sigh which seemed to Westy's anxious ear to betray a more than professional interest in the person referred to.
"Oh, come now—why not? With the Amhersts to give him a start—I heard my cousin recommending him to a lot of people the other day——"
"Oh, he may become a fashionable doctor," Justine assented indifferently; to which her companion rejoined, with a puzzled stare: "That's just what I mean—with Bessy backing him!"
"Has Mrs. Amherst become such a power, then?" Justine asked, taking up the coveted theme just as he despaired of attracting her to it.
"My cousin?" he stretched the two syllables to the cracking-point. "Well, she's awfully rich, you know; and there's nobody smarter. Don't you think so?"
"I don't know; it's so long since I've seen her."
He brightened. "Youdidknow her, then?" But the discovery made her obtuseness the more inexplicable!
"Oh, centuries ago: in another world."
"Centuries—I like that!" Westy gallantly protested,his ardour kindling as she swam once more within his social ken. "And Amherst? You know him too, I suppose? By Jove, here he is now——"
He signalled a tall figure strolling slowly toward them with bent head and brooding gaze. Justine's eye had retained a vivid image of the man with whom, scarcely three years earlier, she had lived through a moment of such poignant intimacy, and she recognized at once his lean outline, and the keen spring of his features, still veiled by the same look of inward absorption. She noticed, as he raised his hat in response to Westy Gaines's greeting, that the vertical lines between his brows had deepened; and a moment later she was aware that this change was the visible token of others which went deeper than the fact of his good clothes and his general air of leisure and well-being—changes perceptible to her only in the startled sense of how prosperity had aged him.
"Hallo, Amherst—trying to get under cover?" Westy jovially accosted him, with a significant gesture toward the crowded lawn from which the new-comer had evidently fled. "I was just telling Miss Brent that this is the safest place on these painful occasions—Oh, confound it, it's not as safe as I thought! Here's one of my sisters making for me!"
There ensued a short conflict of words, before his feeble flutter of resistance was borne down by a resoluteMiss Gaines who, as she swept him back to the marquee, cried out to Amherst that her mother was asking for him too; and then Justine had time to observe that her remaining companion had no intention of responding to his hostess's appeal.
Westy, in naming her, had laid just enough stress on the name to let it serve as a reminder or an introduction, as circumstances might decide, and she saw that Amherst, roused from his abstraction by the proffered clue, was holding his hand out doubtfully.
"I think we haven't met for some years," he said.
Justine smiled. "I have a better reason than you for remembering the exact date;" and in response to his look of surprise she added: "You made me commit a professional breach of faith, and I've never known since whether to be glad or sorry."
Amherst still bent on her the gaze which seemed to find in external details an obstacle rather than a help to recognition; but suddenly his face cleared. "It was you who told me the truth about poor Dillon! I couldn't imagine why I seemed to see you in such a different setting...."
"Oh, I'm disguised as a lady this afternoon," she said smiling. "But I'm glad you saw through the disguise."
He smiled back at her. "Are you? Why?"
"It seems to make it—if it's so transparent—less of a sham, less of a dishonesty," she began impulsively,and then paused again, a little annoyed at the overemphasis of her words. Why was she explaining and excusing herself to this stranger? Did she propose to tell him next that she had borrowed her dress from Effie Dressel? To cover her confusion she went on with a slight laugh: "But you haven't told me."
"What was I to tell you?"
"Whether to be glad or sorry that I broke my vow and told the truth about Dillon."
They were standing face to face in the solitude of the garden-walk, forgetful of everything but the sudden surprised sense of intimacy that had marked their former brief communion. Justine had raised her eyes half-laughingly to Amherst, but they dropped before the unexpected seriousness of his.
"Why do you want to know?" he asked.
She made an effort to sustain the note of pleasantry.
"Well—it might, for instance, determine my future conduct. You see I'm still a nurse, and such problems are always likely to present themselves."
"Ah, then don't!"
"Don't?"
"I mean—" He hesitated a moment, reaching up to break a rose from the branch that tapped his shoulder. "I was only thinking what risks we run when we scramble into the chariot of the gods and try to do the driving. Be passive—be passive, and you'll be happier!"
"Oh, as to that—!" She swept it aside with one of her airy motions. "But Dillon, for instance—wouldhehave been happier if I'd been passive?"
Amherst seemed to ponder. "There again—how can one tell?"
"And the risk's not worth taking?"
"No!"
She paused, and they looked at each other again. "Do you mean that seriously, I wonder? Do you——"
"Act on it myself? God forbid! The gods drive so badly. There's poor Dillon...he happened to be in their way...as we all are at times." He pulled himself up, and went on in a matter-of-fact tone: "In Dillon's case, however, my axioms don't apply. When my wife heard the truth she was, of course, immensely kind to him; and if it hadn't been for you she might never have known."
Justine smiled. "I think you would have found out—I was only the humble instrument. But now—" she hesitated—"now you must be able to do so much—"
Amherst lifted his head, and she saw the colour rise under his fair skin. "Out at Westmore? You've never been there since? Yes—my wife has made some changes; but it's all so problematic—and one would have to live here...."
"You don't, then?"
He answered by an imperceptible shrug. "Of courseI'm here often; and she comes now and then. But the journey's tiresome, and it is not always easy for her to get away." He checked himself, and Justine saw that he, in turn, was suddenly conscious of the incongruity of explaining and extenuating his personal situation to a stranger. "But then we'renotstrangers!" a voice in her exulted, just as he added, with an embarrassed attempt to efface and yet justify his moment of expansion: "That reminds me—I think you know my wife. I heard her asking Mrs. Dressel about you. She wants so much to see you."
The transition had been effected, at the expense of dramatic interest, but to the obvious triumph of social observances; and to Justine, after all, regaining at his side the group about the marquee, the interest was not so much diminished as shifted to the no less suggestive problem of studying the friend of her youth in the unexpected character of John Amherst's wife.
Meanwhile, however, during the brief transit across the Gaines greensward, her thoughts were still busy with Amherst. She had seen at once that the peculiar sense of intimacy reawakened by their meeting had been chilled and deflected by her first allusion to the topic which had previously brought them together: Amherst had drawn back as soon as she named the mills. What could be the cause of his reluctance? When they had last met, the subject burned withinhim: her being in actual fact a stranger had not, then, been an obstacle to his confidences. Now that he was master at Westmore it was plain that another tone became him—that his situation necessitated a greater reserve; but her enquiry did not imply the least wish to overstep this restriction: it merely showed her remembrance of his frankly-avowed interest in the operatives. Justine was struck by the fact that so natural an allusion should put him on the defensive. She did not for a moment believe that he had lost his interest in the mills; and that his point of view should have shifted with the fact of ownership she rejected as an equally superficial reading of his character. The man with whom she had talked at Dillon's bedside was one in whom the ruling purposes had already shaped themselves, and to whom life, in whatever form it came, must henceforth take their mould. As she reached this point in her analysis, it occurred to her that his shrinking from the subject might well imply not indifference, but a deeper preoccupation: a preoccupation for some reason suppressed and almost disavowed, yet sustaining the more intensely its painful hidden life. From this inference it was but a leap of thought to the next—that the cause of the change must be sought outside of himself, in some external influence strong enough to modify the innate lines of his character. And where could such an influence be more obviously sought thanin the marriage which had transformed the assistant manager of the Westmore Mills not, indeed, into their owner—that would rather have tended to simplify the problem—but into the husband of Mrs. Westmore? After all, the mills were Bessy's—and for a farther understanding of the case it remained to find out what manner of person Bessy had become.
Justine's first impression, as her friend's charming arms received her—with an eagerness of welcome not lost on the suspended judgment of feminine Hanaford—the immediate impression was of a gain of emphasis, of individuality, as though the fluid creature she remembered had belied her prediction, and run at last into a definite mould. Yes—Bessy had acquired an outline: a graceful one, as became her early promise, though with, perhaps, a little more sharpness of edge than her youthful texture had promised. But the side she turned to her friend was still all softness—had in it a hint of the old pliancy, the impulse to lean and enlace, that at once woke in Justine the corresponding instinct of guidance and protection, so that their first kiss, before a word was spoken, carried the two back to the precise relation in which their school-days had left them. So easy a reversion to the past left no room for the sense of subsequent changes by which such reunions are sometimes embarrassed. Justine's sympathies had, instinctively, and almost at once, transferredthemselves to Bessy's side—passing over at a leap the pained recognition that thereweresides already—and Bessy had gathered up Justine into the circle of gentle self-absorption which left her very dimly aware of any distinctive characteristic in her friends except that of their affection for herself—since she asked only, as she appealingly put it, that they should all be "dreadfully fond" of her.
"And I've wanted you so often, Justine: you're the only clever person I'm not afraid of, because your cleverness always used to make things clear instead of confusing them. I've asked so many people about you—but I never heard a word till just the other day—wasn't it odd?—when our new doctor at Rushton happened to say that he knew you. I've been rather unwell lately—nervous and tired, and sleeping badly—and he told me I ought to keep perfectly quiet, and be under the care of a nurse who could make me do as she chose: just such a nurse as a wonderful Miss Brent he had known at St. Elizabeth's, whose patients obeyed her as if she'd been the colonel of a regiment. His description made me laugh, it reminded me so much of the way you used to make me do what you wanted at the convent—and then it suddenly occurred to me that I had heard of you having gone in for nursing, and we compared notes, and I found it was really you! Wasn't it odd that we should discover each other in that way?I daresay we might have passed in the street and never known it—I'm sure I must be horribly changed...."
Thus Bessy discoursed, in the semi-isolation to which, under an overarching beech-tree, the discretion of their hostess had allowed the two friends to withdraw for the freer exchange of confidences. There was, at first sight, nothing in her aspect to bear out Mrs. Amherst's plaintive allusion to her health, but Justine, who knew that she had lost a baby a few months previously, assumed that the effect of this shock still lingered, though evidently mitigated by a reviving interest in pretty clothes and the other ornamental accessories of life. Certainly Bessy Amherst had grown into the full loveliness which her childhood promised. She had the kind of finished prettiness that declares itself early, holds its own through the awkward transitions of girlhood, and resists the strain of all later vicissitudes, as though miraculously preserved in some clear medium impenetrable to the wear and tear of living.
"You absurd child! You've not changed a bit except to grow more so!" Justine laughed, paying amused tribute to the childish craving for "a compliment" that still betrayed itself in Bessy's eyes.
"Well,youhave, then, Justine—you've grown extraordinarily handsome!"
"Thatisextraordinary of me, certainly," the other acknowledged gaily. "But then think what room forimprovement there was—and how much time I've had to improve in!"
"It is a long time, isn't it?" Bessy assented. "I feel so intimate, still, with the old Justine of the convent, and I don't know the new one a bit. Just think—I've a great girl of my own, almost as old as we were when we went to the Sacred Heart: But perhaps you don't know anything about me either. You see, I married again two years ago, and my poor baby died last March...so I have only Cicely. It was such a disappointment—I wanted a boy dreadfully, and I understand little babies so much better than a big girl like Cicely.... Oh, dear, here is Juliana Gaines bringing up some more tiresome people! It's such a bore, but John says I must know them all. Well, thank goodness we've only one more day in this dreadful place—and of course I shall see you, dear, before we go...."
Afterconducting Miss Brent to his wife, John Amherst, by the exercise of considerable strategic skill, had once more contrived to detach himself from the throng on the lawn, and, regaining a path in the shrubbery, had taken refuge on the verandah of the house.
Here, under the shade of the awning, two ladies wereseated in a seclusion agreeably tempered by the distant strains of the Hanaford band, and by the shifting prospect of the groups below them.
"Ah, here he is now!" the younger of the two exclaimed, turning on Amherst the smile of intelligence that Mrs. Eustace Ansell was in the habit of substituting for the idle preliminaries of conversation. "We were not talking of you, though," she added as Amherst took the seat to which his mother beckoned him, "but of Bessy—which, I suppose, is almost as indiscreet."
She added the last phrase after an imperceptible pause, and as if in deprecation of the hardly more perceptible frown which, at the mention of his wife's name, had deepened the lines between Amherst's brows.
"Indiscreet of his own mother and his wife's friend?" Mrs. Amherst protested, laying her trimly-gloved hand on her son's arm; while the latter, with his eyes on her companion, said slowly: "Mrs. Ansell knows that indiscretion is the last fault of which her friends are likely to accuse her."
"Raison de plus, you mean?" she laughed, meeting squarely the challenge that passed between them under Mrs. Amherst's puzzled gaze. "Well, if I take advantage of my reputation for discretion to meddle a little now and then, at least I do so in a good cause. I was just saying how much I wish that you would take Bessyto Europe; and I am so sure of my cause, in this case, that I am going to leave it to your mother to give you my reasons."
She rose as she spoke, not with any sign of haste or embarrassment, but as if gracefully recognizing the desire of mother and son to be alone together; but Amherst, rising also, made a motion to detain her.
"No one else will be able to put your reasons half so convincingly," he said with a slight smile, "and I am sure my mother would much rather be spared the attempt."
Mrs. Ansell met the smile as freely as she had met the challenge. "My dear Lucy," she rejoined, laying, as she reseated herself, a light caress on Mrs. Amherst's hand, "I'm sorry to be flattered at your expense, but it's not in human nature to resist such an appeal. You see," she added, raising her eyes to Amherst, "how sure I am of myself—and ofyou, when you've heard me."
"Oh, John is always ready to hear one," his mother murmured innocently.
"Well, I don't know that I shall even ask him to do as much as that—I'm so sure, after all, that my suggestion carries its explanation with it."
There was a moment's pause, during which Amherst let his eyes wander absently over the dissolving groups on the lawn.
"The suggestion that I should take Bessy to Europe?" He paused again. "When—next autumn?"
"No: now—at once. On a long honeymoon."
He frowned slightly at the last word, passing it by to revert to the direct answer to his question.
"At once? No—I can't see that the suggestion carries its explanation with it."
Mrs. Ansell looked at him hesitatingly. She was conscious of the ill-chosen word that still reverberated between them, and the unwonted sense of having blundered made her, for the moment, less completely mistress of herself.
"Ah, you'll see farther presently—" She rose again, unfurling her lace sunshade, as if to give a touch of definiteness to her action. "It's not, after all," she added, with a sweet frankness, "a case for argument, and still less for persuasion. My reasons are excellent—I should insist on putting them to you myself if they were not! But they're so good that I can leave you to find them out—and to back them up with your own, which will probably be a great deal better."
She summed up with a light nod, which included both Amherst and his mother, and turning to descend the verandah steps, waved a signal to Mr. Langhope, who was limping disconsolately toward the house.
"What has she been saying to you, mother?" Amherst asked, returning to his seat beside his mother.
Mrs. Amherst replied by a shake of her head and araised forefinger of reproval. "Now, Johnny, I won't answer a single question till you smooth out those lines between your eyes."
Her son relaxed his frown to smile back at her. "Well, dear, there have to be some wrinkles in every family, and as you absolutely refuse to take your share—" His eyes rested affectionately on the frosty sparkle of her charming old face, which had, in its setting of recovered prosperity, the freshness of a sunny winter morning, when the very snow gives out a suggestion of warmth.
He remembered how, on the evening of his dismissal from the mills, he had paused on the threshold of their sitting-room to watch her a moment in the lamplight, and had thought with bitter compunction of the fresh wrinkle he was about to add to the lines about her eyes. The three years which followed had effaced that wrinkle and veiled the others in a tardy bloom of well-being. From the moment of turning her back on Westmore, and establishing herself in the pretty little house at Hanaford which her son's wife had placed at her disposal, Mrs. Amherst had shed all traces of the difficult years; and the fact that his marriage had enabled him to set free, before it was too late, the pent-up springs of her youthfulness, sometimes seemed to Amherst the clearest gain in his life's confused total of profit and loss. It was, at any rate, the sense of Bessy's share inthe change that softened his voice when he spoke of her to his mother.
"Now, then, if I present a sufficiently unruffled surface, let us go back to Mrs. Ansell—for I confess that her mysterious reasons are not yet apparent to me."
Mrs. Amherst looked deprecatingly at her son. "Maria Ansell is devoted to you too, John——"
"Of course she is! It's herrôleto be devoted to everybody—especially to her enemies."
"Her enemies?"
"Oh, I didn't intend any personal application. But why does she want me to take Bessy abroad?"
"She and Mr. Langhope think that Bessy is not looking well."
Amherst paused, and the frown showed itself for a moment. "What doyouthink, mother?"
"I hadn't noticed it myself: Bessy seems to me prettier than ever. But perhaps she has less colour—and she complains of not sleeping. Maria thinks she still frets over the baby."
Amherst made an impatient gesture. "Is Europe the only panacea?"
"You should consider, John, that Bessy is used to change and amusement. I think you sometimes forget that other people haven't your faculty of absorbing themselves in a single interest. And Maria says that the new doctor at Clifton, whom they seem to think soclever, is very anxious that Bessy should go to Europe this summer."
"No doubt; and so is every one else: I mean her father and old Tredegar—and your friend Mrs. Ansell not least."
Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright black eyes to his. "Well, then—if they all think she needs it——"
"Good heavens, if travel were what she needed!—Why, we've never stopped travelling since we married. We've been everywhere on the globe except at Hanaford—this is her second visit here in three years!" He rose and took a rapid turn across the deserted verandah. "It's not because her health requires it—it's to get me away from Westmore, to prevent things being done there that ought to be done!" he broke out vehemently, halting again before his mother.
The aged pink faded from Mrs. Amherst's face, but her eyes retained their lively glitter. "To prevent things being done? What a strange thing to say!"
"I shouldn't have said it if I hadn't seen you falling under Mrs. Ansell's spell."
His mother had a gesture which showed from whom he had inherited his impulsive movements. "Really, my son—!" She folded her hands, and added after a pause of self-recovery: "If you mean that I have ever attempted to interfere——"
"No, no: but when they pervert things so damnably——"
"John!"
He dropped into his chair again, and pushed the hair from his forehead with a groan.
"Well, then—put it that they have as much right to their view as I have: I only want you to see what it is. Whenever I try to do anything at Westmore—to give a real start to the work that Bessy and I planned together—some pretext is found to stop it: to pack us off to the ends of the earth, to cry out against reducing her income, to encourage her in some new extravagance to which the work at the mills must be sacrificed!"
Mrs. Amherst, growing pale under this outbreak, assured herself by a nervous backward glance that their privacy was still uninvaded; then her eyes returned to her son's face.
"John—are you sure you're not sacrificing your wife to the mills?"
He grew pale in turn, and they looked at each other for a moment without speaking.
"You see it as they do, then?" he rejoined with a discouraged sigh.
"I see it as any old woman would, who had my experiences to look back to."
"Mother!" he exclaimed.
She smiled composedly. "Do you think I meanthat as a reproach? That's because men will never understand women—least of all, sons their mothers. No real mother wants to come first; she puts her son's career ahead of everything. But it's different with a wife—and a wife as much in love as Bessy."
Amherst looked away. "I should have thought that was a reason——"
"That would reconcile her to being set aside, to counting only second in your plans?"
"They wereherplans when we married!"
"Ah, my dear—!" She paused on that, letting her shrewd old glance, and all the delicate lines of experience in her face, supply what farther comment the ineptitude of his argument invited.
He took the full measure of her meaning, receiving it in a baffled silence that continued as she rose and gathered her lace mantle about her, as if to signify that their confidences could not, on such an occasion, be farther prolonged without singularity. Then he stood up also and joined her, resting his hand on hers while she leaned on the verandah rail.
"Poor mother! And I've kept you to myself all this time, and spoiled your good afternoon."
"No, dear; I was a little tired, and had slipped away to be quiet." She paused, and then went on, persuasively giving back his pressure: "I know how you feel about doing your duty, John; but now that thingsare so comfortably settled, isn't it a pity to unsettle them?"
Amherst had intended, on leaving his mother, to rejoin Bessy, whom he could still discern, on the lawn, in absorbed communion with Miss Brent; but after what had passed it seemed impossible, for the moment, to recover the garden-party tone, and he made his escape through the house while a trio of Cuban singers, who formed the crowning number of the entertainment, gathered the company in a denser circle about their guitars.
As he walked on aimlessly under the deep June shadows of Maplewood Avenue his mother's last words formed an ironical accompaniment to his thoughts. "Now that things are comfortably settled—" he knew so well what that elastic epithet covered! Himself, for instance, ensconced in the impenetrable prosperity of his wonderful marriage; herself too (unconsciously, dear soul!), so happily tucked away in a cranny of that new and spacious life, and no more able to conceive why existing conditions should be disturbed than the bird in the eaves understands why the house should be torn down. Well—he had learned at last what his experience with his poor, valiant, puzzled mother might have taught him: that one must never ask from women any view but the personal one, any measure of conductbut that of their own pains and pleasures. She, indeed, had borne undauntedly enough the brunt of their earlier trials; but that was merely because, as she said, the mother's instinct bade her heap all her private hopes on the great devouring altar of her son's ambition; it was not because she had ever, in the very least, understood or sympathized with his aims.
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 crampedand 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 hisbeaux 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 millswereBessy—at least he had thought so whenhe 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 toforget 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 shehadreturned 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.