Mrs. Amherst wrinkled her brows thoughtfully. “I wonder if she’s not the thin dark girl I saw the other day with Mrs. Harry Dressel. Was she tall and rather handsome?”
“I don’t know,” murmured Amherst indifferently. As a rule he was humorously resigned to his mother’s habit of deserting the general for the particular, and following some irrelevant thread of association in utter disregard of the main issue. But tonight, preoccupied with his subject, and incapable of conceiving how anyone else could be unaffected by it, he resented her indifference as a sign of incurable frivolity.
“How she can live close to such suffering and forget it!” was his thought; then, with a movement of self-reproach, he remembered that the work flying through her fingers was to take shape as a garment for one of the infant Dillons. “She takes her pity out in action, like that quiet nurse, who was as cool as a drum-major till she took off her uniform—and then!” His face softened at the recollection of the girl’s outbreak. Much as he admired, in theory, the woman who kept a calm exterior in emergencies, he had all a man’s desire to know that the springs of feeling lay close to the unruffled surface.
Mrs. Amherst had risen and crossed over to his chair. She leaned on it a moment, pushing the tossed brown hair from his forehead.
“John, have you considered what you mean to do next?”
He threw back his head to meet her gaze.
“About this Dillon case,” she continued. “How are all these investigations going to help you?”
Their eyes rested on each other for a moment; then he said coldly: “You are afraid I am going to lose my place.”
She flushed like a girl and murmured: “It’s not the kind of place I ever wanted to see you in!”
“I know it,” he returned in a gentler tone, clasping one of the hands on his chair-back. “I ought to have followed a profession, like my grandfather; but my father’s blood was too strong in me. I should never have been content as anything but a working-man.”
“How can you call your father a working-man? He had a genius for mechanics, and if he had lived he would have been as great in his way as any statesman or lawyer.”
Amherst smiled. “Greater, to my thinking; but he gave me his hard-working hands without the genius to create with them. I wish I had inherited more from him, or less; but I must make the best of what I am, rather than try to be somebody else.” He laid her hand caressingly against his cheek. “It’s hard on you, mother—but you must bear with me.”
“I have never complained, John; but now you’ve chosen your work, it’s natural that I should want you to stick to it.”
He rose with an impatient gesture. “Never fear; I could easily get another job–-“
“What? If Truscomb blacklisted you? Do you forget that Scotch overseer who was here when we came?”
“And whom Truscomb hounded out of the trade? I remember him,” said Amherst grimly; “but I have an idea I am going to do the hounding this time.”
His mother sighed, but her reply was cut short by the noisy opening of the outer door. Amherst seemed to hear the sound with relief. “There’s Duplain,” he said, going into the passage; but on the threshold he encountered, not the young Alsatian overseer who boarded with them, but a small boy who said breathlessly: “Mr. Truscomb wants you to come down bimeby.”
“This evening? To the office?”
“No—he’s sick a-bed.”
The blood rushed to Amherst’s face, and he had to press his lips close to check an exclamation. “Say I’ll come as soon as I’ve had supper,” he said.
The boy vanished, and Amherst turned back to the sitting-room. “Truscomb’s ill—he has sent for me; and I saw Mrs. Westmore arriving tonight! Have supper, mother—we won’t wait for Duplain.” His face still glowed with excitement, and his eyes were dark with the concentration of his inward vision.
“Oh, John, John!” Mrs. Amherst sighed, crossing the passage to the kitchen.
III
AT the manager’s door Amherst was met by Mrs. Truscomb, a large flushed woman in a soiled wrapper and diamond earrings.
“Mr. Truscomb’s very sick. He ought not to see you. The doctor thinks—” she began.
Dr. Disbrow, at this point, emerged from the sitting-room. He was a pale man, with a beard of mixed grey-and-drab, and a voice of the same indeterminate quality.
“Good evening, Mr. Amherst. Truscomb is pretty poorly—on the edge of pneumonia, I’m afraid. As he seems anxious to see you I think you’d better go up for two minutes—not more, please.” He paused, and went on with a smile: “You won’t excite him, of course—nothing unpleasant–-“
“He’s worried himself sick over that wretched Dillon,” Mrs. Truscomb interposed, draping her wrapper majestically about an indignant bosom.
“That’s it—puts too much heart into his work. But we’ll have Dillon all right before long,” the physician genially declared.
Mrs. Truscomb, with a reluctant gesture, led Amherst up the handsomely carpeted stairs to the room where her husband lay, a prey to the cares of office. She ushered the young man in, and withdrew to the next room, where he heard her coughing at intervals, as if to remind him that he was under observation.
The manager of the Westmore mills was not the type of man that Amherst’s comments on his superior suggested. As he sat propped against the pillows, with a brick-red flush on his cheek-bones, he seemed at first glance to belong to the innumerable army of American business men—the sallow, undersized, lacklustre drudges who have never lifted their heads from the ledger. Even his eye, now bright with fever, was dull and non-committal in daily life; and perhaps only the ramifications of his wrinkles could have revealed what particular ambitions had seamed his soul.
“Good evening, Amherst. I’m down with a confounded cold.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” the young man forced himself to say.
“Can’t get my breath—that’s the trouble.” Truscomb paused and gasped. “I’ve just heard that Mrs. Westmore is here—and I want you to go round—tomorrow morning—” He had to break off once more.
“Yes, sir,” said Amherst, his heart leaping.
“Needn’t see her—ask for her father, Mr. Langhope. Tell him what the doctor says—I’ll be on my legs in a day or two—ask ‘em to wait till I can take ‘em over the mills.”
He shot one of his fugitive glances at his assistant, and held up a bony hand. “Wait a minute. On your way there, stop and notify Mr. Gaines. He was to meet them here. You understand?”
“Yes, sir,” said Amherst; and at that moment Mrs. Truscomb appeared on the threshold.
“I must ask you to come now, Mr. Amherst,” she began haughtily; but a glance from her husband reduced her to a heaving pink nonentity.
“Hold on, Amherst. I hear you’ve been in to Hanaford. Did you go to the hospital?”
“Ezra—” his wife murmured: he looked through her.
“Yes,” said Amherst.
Truscomb’s face seemed to grow smaller and dryer. He transferred his look from his wife to his assistant.
“All right. You’ll just bear in mind that it’s Disbrow’s business to report Dillon’s case to Mrs. Westmore? You’re to confine yourself to my message. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly clear. Goodnight,” Amherst answered, as he turned to follow Mrs. Truscomb.
That same evening, four persons were seated under the bronze chandelier in the red satin drawing-room of the Westmore mansion. One of the four, the young lady in widow’s weeds whose face had arrested Miss Brent’s attention that afternoon, rose from a massively upholstered sofa and drifted over to the fireplace near which her father sat.
“Didn’t I tell you it was awful, father?” she sighed, leaning despondently against the high carved mantelpiece surmounted by a bronze clock in the form of an obelisk.