The Fruit of the Tree Part 17

XI

AFTER conducting 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 were seated 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 subst.i.tuting 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 pa.s.sed 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 Bessy to 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 embarra.s.sment, 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 of _you_, 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, pa.s.sing 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 a raised 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 in the 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 her _role_ to 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 do _you_ think, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt.

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 so clever, 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 d.a.m.nably----"

"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, a.s.sured 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.