"Mrs. Westmore?" he asked, restored to self-command by the perception that his longed-for opportunity was at hand; and Bessy, his voice confirming the inference she had drawn from his appearance, replied with a smile: "I am Mrs. Westmore. But if you have come to see me, I ought to tell you that in a moment I shall be obliged to go out to our mills. I have a business appointment with our manager, but if——"
She broke off, gracefully waiting for him to insert his explanation.
"I have come from the manager; I am John Amherst—your assistant manager," he added, as the mention of his name apparently conveyed no enlightenment.
Mrs. Westmore's face changed, and she let slip a murmur of surprise that would certainly have flattered Amherst's mother if she could have heard it; but it had an opposite effect on the young man, who inwardly accused himself of having tried to disguise his trade by not putting on his everyday clothes.
"How stupid of me! I took you for—I had no idea; I didn't expect Mr. Truscomb here," his employer faltered in embarrassment; then their eyes met and both smiled.
"Mr. Truscomb sent me to tell you that he is ill, and will not be able to show you the mills today. I didn't mean to ask for you—I was told to give the message to Mr. Langhope," Amherst scrupulously explained, trying to repress the sudden note of joy in his voice.
He was subject to the unobservant man's acute flashes of vision, and Mrs. Westmore's beauty was like a blinding light abruptly turned on eyes subdued to obscurity. As he spoke, his glance passed from her face to her hair, and remained caught in its meshes. He had never seen such hair—it did not seem to grow in the usual orderly way, but bubbled up all over her head in independent clusters of brightness, breaking, about the brow, the temples, the nape, into little irrelevant waves and eddies of light, with dusky hollows of softness where the hand might plunge. It takes but the throb of a nerve to carry such a complex impression from the eye to the mind, but the object of the throb had perhaps felt the electric flash of its passage, for her colour rose while Amherst spoke.
"Ah, here is my father now," she said with a vague accent of relief, as Mr. Langhope's stick was heard tapping its way across the hall.
When he entered, accompanied by Mrs. Ansell, his sharp glance of surprise at her visitor told her that he was as much misled as herself, and gave her a sense of being agreeably justified in her blunder. "If father thinks you're a gentleman——" her shining eyes seemed to say, as she explained: "This is Mr. Amherst, father: Mr. Truscomb has sent him."
"Mr. Amherst?" Langhope, with extended hand, echoed affably but vaguely; and it became clear that neither Mrs. Westmore nor her father had ever before heard the name of their assistant manager.
The discovery stung Amherst to a somewhat unreasoning resentment; and while he was trying to subordinate this sentiment to the larger feelings with which he had entered the house, Mrs. Ansell, turning her eyes on him, said gently: "Your name is unusual. I had a friend named Lucy Warne who married a very clever man—a mechanical genius——"
Amherst's face cleared. "My father was a genius; and my mother is Lucy Warne," he said, won by the soft look and the persuasive voice.
"What a delightful coincidence! We were girls together at Albany. You must remember Judge Warne?" she said, turning to Mr. Langhope, who, twirling his white moustache, murmured, a shade less cordially: "Of course—of course—delightful—most interesting."
Amherst did not notice the difference. His perceptions were already enveloped in the caress that emanated from Mrs. Ansell's voice and smile; and he only asked himself vaguely if it were possible that this graceful woman, with her sunny autumnal air, could really be his mother's contemporary. But the question brought an instant reaction of bitterness.
"Poverty is the only thing that makes people old nowadays," he reflected, painfully conscious of his own share in the hardships his mother had endured; and when Mrs. Ansell went on: "I must go and see her—you must let me take her by surprise," he said stiffly: "We live out at the mills, a long way from here."
"Oh, we're going there this morning," she rejoined, unrebuffed by what she probably took for a mere social awkwardness, while Mrs. Westmore interposed: "But, Maria, Mr. Truscomb is ill, and has sent Mr. Amherst to say that we are not to come."
"Yes: so Gaines has just telephoned. It's most unfortunate," Mr. Langhope grumbled. He too was already beginning to chafe at the uncongenial exile of Hanaford, and he shared his daughter's desire to despatch the tiresome business before them.
Mr. Tredegar had meanwhile appeared, and when Amherst had been named to him, and had received his Olympian nod, Bessy anxiously imparted her difficulty.
"But how ill is Mr. Truscomb? Do you think he can take us over the mills tomorrow?" she appealed to Amherst.
"I'm afraid not; I am sure he can't. He has a touch of bronchitis."
This announcement was met by a general outcry, in which sympathy for the manager was not the predominating note. Mrs. Ansell saved the situation by breathing feelingly: "Poor man!" and after a decent echo of the phrase, and a doubtful glance at her father, Mrs. Westmore said: "If it's bronchitis he may be ill for days, and what in the world are we to do?"
"Pack up and come back later," suggested Mr. Langhope briskly; but while Bessy sighed "Oh, that dreadful journey!" Mr. Tredegar interposed with authority: "One moment, Langhope, please. Mr. Amherst, is Mrs. Westmore expected at the mills?"
"Yes, I believe they know she is coming."
"Then I think, my dear, that to go back to New York without showing yourself would, under the circumstances, be—er—an error in judgment."
"Good Lord, Tredegar, you don't expect to keep us kicking our heels here for days?" her father ejaculated.
"I can certainly not afford to employ mine in that manner for even a fraction of a day," rejoined the lawyer, always acutely resentful of the suggestion that he had a disengaged moment; "but meanwhile——"
"Father," Bessy interposed, with an eagerly flushing cheek, "don't you see that the only thing for us to do is to go over the mills now—at once—with Mr. Amherst?"
Mr. Langhope stared: he was always adventurously ready to unmake plans, but it flustered him to be called on to remake them. "Eh—what? Now—at once? But Gaines was to have gone with us, and how on earth are we to get at him? He telephoned me that, as the visit was given up, he should ride out to his farm."
"Oh, never mind—or, at least, all the better!" his daughter urged. "We can see the mills just as well without him; and we shall get on so much more quickly."
"Well—well—what do you say, Tredegar?" murmured Mr. Langhope, allured by her last argument; and Bessy, clasping her hands, summed up enthusiastically: "And I shall understand so much better without a lot of people trying to explain to me at once!"
Her sudden enthusiasm surprised no one, for even Mrs. Ansell, expert as she was in the interpreting of tones, set it down to the natural desire to have done as quickly as might be with Hanaford.
"Mrs. Westmore has left her little girl at home," she said to Amherst, with a smile intended to counteract the possible ill-effect of the impression.
But Amherst suspected no slight in his employer's eagerness to visit Westmore. His overmastering thought was one of joy as the fulness of his opportunity broke on him. To show her the mills himself—to bring her face to face with her people, unhampered by Truscomb's jealous vigilance, and Truscomb's false explanations; to see the angel of pity stir the depths of those unfathomable eyes, when they rested, perhaps for the first time, on suffering that it was in their power to smile away as easily as they had smiled away his own distrust—all this the wonderful moment had brought him, and thoughts and arguments thronged so hot on his lips that he kept silence, fearing lest he should say too much.