Mrs. Ansell received his outburst in silence, and the butler, reappearing with the kettle and fresh toast, gave her the chance to prolong her pause for a full minute. When the door had closed on him, she said: "Judged by reason, your arguments are unanswerable; but when it comes to a question of feeling——"
"Feeling? What kind of feeling? You don't mean to suggest anything so preposterous as that Bessy——?"
She made a gesture of smiling protest. "I confess it is to be regretted that his mother is a lady, and that he looks—you must have noticed it?—so amazingly like the portraits of the young Schiller. But I only meant that Bessy forms all her opinions emotionally; and that she must have been very strongly affected by the scene Mr. Tredegar described to us."
"Ah," Mr. Langhope interjected, replying first to her parenthesis, "how a woman of your good sense stumbled on that idea of hunting up the mother—!" but Mrs. Ansell answered, with a slight grimace: "My dear Henry, if you could see the house they live in you'd think I had been providentially guided there!" and, reverting to the main issue, he went on fretfully: "But why, after hearing the true version of the facts, should Bessy still be influenced by that sensational scene? Even if it was not, as Tredegar suspects, cooked up expressly to take her in, she must see that the hospital doctor is, after all, as likely as any one to know how the accident really happened, and how seriously the fellow is hurt."
"There's the point. Why should Bessy believe Dr. Disbrow rather than Mr. Amherst?"
"For the best of reasons—because Disbrow has nothing to gain by distorting the facts, whereas this young Amherst, as Tredegar pointed out, has the very obvious desire to give Truscomb a bad name and shove himself into his place."
Mrs. Ansell contemplatively turned the rings upon her fingers. "From what I saw of Amherst I'm inclined to think that, if that is his object, he is too clever to have shown his hand so soon. But if you are right, was there not all the more reason for letting Bessy see him and find out as soon as possible what he was aiming at?"
"If one could have trusted her to find out—but you credit my poor child with more penetration than I've ever seen in her."
"Perhaps you've looked for it at the wrong time—and about the wrong things. Bessy has the penetration of the heart."
"The heart! You make mine jump when you use such expressions."
"Oh, I use this one in a general sense. But I want to help you to keep it from acquiring a more restricted significance."
"Restricted—to the young man himself?"
Mrs. Ansell's expressive hands seemed to commit the question to fate. "All I ask you to consider for the present is that Bessy is quite unoccupied and excessively bored."
"Bored? Why, she has everything on earth she can want!"
"The ideal state for producing boredom—the only atmosphere in which it really thrives. And besides—to be humanly inconsistent—there's just one thing she hasn't got."
"Well?" Mr. Langhope groaned, fortifying himself with a second cigarette.
"An occupation for that rudimentary little organ, the mention of which makes you jump."
"There you go again! Good heavens, Maria, do you want to encourage her to fall in love?"
"Not with a man, just at present, but with a hobby, an interest, by all means. If she doesn't, the man will take the place of the interest—there's a vacuum to be filled, and human nature abhors a vacuum."
Mr. Langhope shrugged his shoulders. "I don't follow you. She adored her husband."
His friend's fine smile was like a magnifying glass silently applied to the gross stupidity of his remark. "Oh, I don't say it was a great passion—but they got on perfectly," he corrected himself.
"So perfectly that you must expect her to want a little storm and stress for a change. The mere fact that you and Mr. Tredegar objected to her seeing Mr. Amherst last night has roused the spirit of opposition in her. A year ago she hadn't any spirit of opposition."
"There was nothing for her to oppose—poor Dick made her life so preposterously easy."
"My ingenuous friend! Do you still think that's any reason? The fact is, Bessy wasn't awake, she wasn't even born, then. … She is now, and you know the infant's first conscious joy is to smash things."
"It will be rather an expensive joy if the mills are the first thing she smashes."
"Oh I imagine the mills are pretty substantial. I should, I own," Mrs. Ansell smiled, "not object to seeing her try her teeth on them."
"Which, in terms of practical conduct, means——?"
"That I advise you not to disapprove of her staying on, or of her investigating the young man's charges. You must remember that another peculiarity of the infant mind is to tire soonest of the toy that no one tries to take away from it."
"Que diable! But suppose Truscomb turns rusty at this very unusual form of procedure? Perhaps you don't quite know how completely he represents the prosperity of the mills."
"All the more reason," Mrs. Ansell persisted, rising at the sound of Mr. Tredegar's approach. "For don't you perceive, my poor distracted friend, that if Truscomb turns rusty, as he undoubtedly will, the inevitable result will be his manager's dismissal—and that thereafter there will presumably be peace in Warsaw?"
"Ah, you divinely wicked woman!" cried Mr. Langhope, snatching at an appreciative pressure of her hand as the lawyer reappeared in the doorway.
VI
Before daylight that same morning Amherst, dressing by the gas-flame above his cheap wash-stand, strove to bring some order into his angry thoughts. It humbled him to feel his purpose tossing rudderless on unruly waves of emotion, yet strive as he would he could not regain a hold on it. The events of the last twenty-four hours had been too rapid and unexpected for him to preserve his usual clear feeling of mastery; and he had, besides, to reckon with the first complete surprise of his senses. His way of life had excluded him from all contact with the subtler feminine influences, and the primitive side of the relation left his imagination untouched. He was therefore the more assailable by those refined forms of the ancient spell that lurk in delicacy of feeling interpreted by loveliness of face. By his own choice he had cut himself off from all possibility of such communion; had accepted complete abstinence for that part of his nature which might have offered a refuge from the stern prose of his daily task. But his personal indifference to his surroundings—deliberately encouraged as a defiance to the attractions of the life he had renounced—proved no defence against this appeal; rather, the meanness of his surroundings combined with his inherited refinement of taste to deepen the effect of Bessy's charm.
As he reviewed the incidents of the past hours, a reaction of self-derision came to his aid. What was this exquisite opportunity from which he had cut himself off? What, to reduce the question to a personal issue, had Mrs. Westmore said or done that, on the part of a plain woman, would have quickened his pulses by the least fraction of a second? Why, it was only the old story of the length of Cleopatra's nose! Because her eyes were a heavenly vehicle for sympathy, because her voice was pitched to thrill the tender chords, he had been deluded into thinking that she understood and responded to his appeal. And her own emotions had been wrought upon by means as cheap: it was only the obvious, theatrical side of the incident that had affected her. If Dillon's wife had been old and ugly, would she have been clasped to her employer's bosom? A more expert knowledge of the sex would have told Amherst that such ready sympathy is likely to be followed by