The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fruit of the Tree, by Edith Wharton

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Title: The Fruit of the Tree

Author: Edith Wharton

Illustrator: Alonzo Kimball

Release Date: September 6, 2006 [EBook #19191]

Language: English

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THE FRUIT OF THE TREE




[Illustration: He stood by her in silence, his eyes on the injured
man.]




THE FRUIT OF THE TREE
BY
EDITH WHARTON

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALONZO KIMBALL




NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
MDCCCCVII




COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

[Illustration: mark]




ILLUSTRATIONS

_He stood by her in silence, his eyes on the injured man_  _Frontispiece_
_"No--I shall have to ask you to take my word for it"_     _Facing p. 82_
_Half-way up the slope they met_                            130




BOOK I




THE FRUIT OF THE TREE

I


IN the surgical ward of the Hope Hospital at Hanaford, a nurse was
bending over a young man whose bandaged right hand and arm lay stretched
along the bed.

His head stirred uneasily, and slipping her arm behind him she effected
a professional readjustment of the pillows. "Is that better?"

As she leaned over, he lifted his anxious bewildered eyes, deep-sunk
under ridges of suffering. "I don't s'pose there's any kind of a show
for me, is there?" he asked, pointing with his free hand--the stained
seamed hand of the mechanic--to the inert bundle on the quilt.

Her only immediate answer was to wipe the dampness from his forehead;
then she said: "We'll talk about that to-morrow."

"Why not now?"

"Because Dr. Disbrow can't tell till the inflammation goes down."

"Will it go down by to-morrow?"

"It will begin to, if you don't excite yourself and keep up the fever."

"Excite myself? I--there's four of 'em at home----"

"Well, then there are four reasons for keeping quiet," she rejoined.

She did not use, in speaking, the soothing inflection of her trade: she
seemed to disdain to cajole or trick the sufferer. Her full young voice
kept its cool note of authority, her sympathy revealing itself only in
the expert touch of her hands and the constant vigilance of her dark
steady eyes. This vigilance softened to pity as the patient turned his
head away with a groan. His free left hand continued to travel the
sheet, clasping and unclasping itself in contortions of feverish unrest.
It was as though all the anguish of his mutilation found expression in
that lonely hand, left without work in the world now that its mate was
useless.

The nurse felt a touch on her shoulder, and rose to face the matron, a
sharp-featured woman with a soft intonation.

"This is Mr. Amherst, Miss Brent. The assistant manager from the mills.
He wishes to see Dillon."

John Amherst's step was singularly noiseless. The nurse, sensitive by
nature and training to all physical characteristics, was struck at once
by the contrast between his alert face and figure and the silent way in
which he moved. She noticed, too, that the same contrast was repeated in
the face itself, its spare energetic outline, with the high nose and
compressed lips of the mover of men, being curiously modified by the
veiled inward gaze of the grey eyes he turned on her. It was one of the
interests of Justine Brent's crowded yet lonely life to attempt a rapid
mental classification of the persons she met; but the contradictions in
Amherst's face baffled her, and she murmured inwardly "I don't know" as
she drew aside to let him approach the bed. He stood by her in silence,
his hands clasped behind him, his eyes on the injured man, who lay
motionless, as if sunk in a lethargy. The matron, at the call of another
nurse, had minced away down the ward, committing Amherst with a glance
to Miss Brent; and the two remained alone by the bed.

After a pause, Amherst moved toward the window beyond the empty cot
adjoining Dillon's. One of the white screens used to isolate dying
patients had been placed against this cot, which was the last at that
end of the ward, and the space beyond formed a secluded corner, where a
few words could be exchanged out of reach of the eyes in the other beds.

"Is he asleep?" Amherst asked, as Miss Brent joined him.

Miss Brent glanced at him again. His voice betokened not merely
education, but something different and deeper--the familiar habit of
gentle speech; and his shabby clothes--carefully brushed, but ill-cut
and worn along the seams--sat on him easily, and with the same
difference.

"The morphine has made him drowsy," she answered. "The wounds were
dressed about an hour ago, and the doctor gave him a hypodermic."

"The wounds--how many are there?"

"Besides the hand, his arm is badly torn up to the elbow."

Amherst listened with bent head and frowning brow.

"What do you think of the case?"

She hesitated. "Dr. Disbrow hasn't said----"

"And it's not your business to?" He smiled slightly. "I know hospital
etiquette. But I have a particular reason for asking." He broke off and
looked at her again, his veiled gaze sharpening to a glance of
concentrated attention. "You're not one of the regular nurses, are you?
Your dress seems to be of a different colour."

She smiled at the "seems to be," which denoted a tardy and imperfect
apprehension of the difference between dark-blue linen and white.

"No: I happened to be staying at Hanaford, and hearing that they were in
want of a surgical nurse, I offered my help."

Amherst nodded. "So much the better. Is there any place where I can say
two words to you?"

"I could hardly leave the ward now, unless Mrs. Ogan comes back."

"I don't care to have you call Mrs. Ogan," he interposed quickly. "When
do you go off duty?"

She looked at him in surprise. "If what you want to ask about
is--anything connected with the management of things here--you know
we're not supposed to talk of our patients outside of the hospital."

"I know. But I am going to ask you to break through the rule--in that
poor fellow's behalf."

A protest wavered on her lip, but he held her eyes steadily, with a
glint of good-humour behind his determination. "When do you go off
duty?"

"At six."

"I'll wait at the corner of South Street and walk a little way with you.
Let me put my case, and if you're not convinced you can refuse to
answer."

"Very well," she said, without farther hesitation; and Amherst, with a
slight nod of farewell, passed through the door near which they had been
standing.




II

WHEN Justine Brent emerged from the Hope Hospital the October dusk had
fallen and the wide suburban street was almost dark, except when the
illuminated bulk of an electric car flashed by under the maples.

She crossed the tracks and approached the narrower thoroughfare where
Amherst awaited her. He hung back a moment, and she was amused to see
that he failed to identify the uniformed nurse with the girl in her trim
dark dress, soberly complete in all its accessories, who advanced to
him, smiling under her little veil.

"Thank you," he said as he turned and walked beside her. "Is this your
way?"

"I am staying in Oak Street. But it's just as short to go by Maplewood
Avenue."

"Yes; and quieter."

For a few yards they walked on in silence, their long steps falling
naturally into time, though Amherst was somewhat taller than his
companion.

At length he said: "I suppose you know nothing about the relation
between Hope Hospital and the Westmore Mills."

"Only that the hospital was endowed by one of the Westmore family."

"Yes; an old Miss Hope, a great-aunt of Westmore's. But there is more
than that between them--all kinds of subterranean passages." He paused,
and began again: "For instance, Dr. Disbrow married the sister of our
manager's wife."

"Your chief at the mills?"

"Yes," he said with a slight grimace. "So you see, if Truscomb--the
manager--thinks one of the mill-hands is only slightly injured, it's
natural that his brother-in-law, Dr. Disbrow, should take an optimistic
view of the case."

"Natural? I don't know----"

"Don't you think it's natural that a man should be influenced by his
wife?"

"Not where his professional honour is concerned."

Amherst smiled. "That sounds very young--if you'll excuse my saying so.
Well, I won't go on to insinuate that, Truscomb being high in favour
with the Westmores, and the Westmores having a lien on the hospital,
Disbrow's position there is also bound up with his taking--more or
less--the same view as Truscomb's."

Miss Brent had paused abruptly on the deserted pavement.

"No, don't go on--if you want me to think well of you," she flashed out.

Amherst met the thrust composedly, perceiving, as she turned to face
him, that what she resented was not so much his insinuation against his
superiors as his allusion to the youthfulness of her sentiments. She
was, in fact, as he now noticed, still young enough to dislike being
excused for her youth. In her severe uniform of blue linen, her dusky
skin darkened by the nurse's cap, and by the pale background of the
hospital walls, she had seemed older, more competent and experienced;
but he now saw how fresh was the pale curve of her cheek, and how
smooth the brow clasped in close waves of hair.

"I began at the wrong end," he acknowledged. "But let me put Dillon's
case before you dismiss me."

She softened. "It is only because of my interest in that poor fellow
that I am here----"

"Because you think he needs help--and that you can help him?"

But she held back once more. "Please tell me about him first," she said,
walking on.

Amherst met the request with another question. "I wonder how much you
know about factory life?"

"Oh, next to nothing. Just what I've managed to pick up in these two
days at the hospital."

He glanced at her small determined profile under its dark roll of hair,
and said, half to himself: "That might be a good deal."

She took no notice of this, and he went on: "Well, I won't try to put
the general situation before you, though Dillon's accident is really the
result of it. He works in the carding room, and on the day of the
accident his 'card' stopped suddenly, and he put his hand behind him to
get a tool he needed out of his trouser-pocket. He reached back a little
too far, and the card behind him caught his hand in its million of
diamond-pointed wires. Truscomb and the overseer of the room maintain
that the accident was due to his own carelessness; but the hands say
that it was caused by the fact of the cards being too near together, and
that just such an accident was bound to happen sooner or later."

Miss Brent drew an eager breath. "And what do _you_ say?"

"That they're right: the carding-room is shamefully overcrowded. Dillon
hasn't been in it long--he worked his way up at the mills from being a
bobbin-boy--and he hadn't yet learned how cautious a man must be in
there. The cards are so close to each other that even the old hands run
narrow risks, and it takes the cleverest operative some time to learn
that he must calculate every movement to a fraction of an inch."

"But why do they crowd the rooms in that way?"

"To get the maximum of profit out of the minimum of floor-space. It
costs more to increase the floor-space than to maim an operative now and
then."

"I see. Go on," she murmured.

"That's the first point; here is the second. Dr. Disbrow told Truscomb
this morning that Dillon's hand would certainly be saved, and that he
might get back to work in a couple of months if the company would
present him with an artificial finger or two."

Miss Brent faced him with a flush of indignation. "Mr. Amherst--who gave
you this version of Dr. Disbrow's report?"

"The manager himself."

"Verbally?"

"No--he showed me Disbrow's letter."

For a moment or two they walked on silently through the quiet street;
then she said, in a voice still stirred with feeling: "As I told you
this afternoon, Dr. Disbrow has said nothing in my hearing."

"And Mrs. Ogan?"

"Oh, Mrs. Ogan--" Her voice broke in a ripple of irony. "Mrs. Ogan
'feels it to be such a beautiful dispensation, my dear, that, owing to a
death that very morning in the surgical ward, we happened to have a bed
ready for the poor man within three hours of the accident.'" She had
exchanged her deep throat-tones for a high reedy note which perfectly
simulated the matron's lady-like inflections.

Amherst, at the change, turned on her with a boyish burst of laughter:
she joined in it, and for a moment they were blent in that closest of
unions, the discovery of a common fund of humour.

She was the first to grow grave. "That three hours' delay didn't help
matters--how is it there is no emergency hospital at the mills?"

Amherst laughed again, but in a different key. "That's part of the
larger question, which we haven't time for now." He waited a moment, and
then added: "You've not yet given me your own impression of Dillon's
case."

"You shall have it, if you saw that letter. Dillon will certainly lose
his hand--and probably the whole arm." She spoke with a thrilling of her
slight frame that transformed the dispassionate professional into a girl
shaken with indignant pity.

Amherst stood still before her. "Good God! Never anything but useless
lumber?"

"Never----"

"And he won't die?"

"Alas!"

"He has a consumptive wife and three children. She ruined her health
swallowing cotton-dust at the factory," Amherst continued.

"So she told me yesterday."

He turned in surprise. "You've had a talk with her?"

"I went out to Westmore last night. I was haunted by her face when she
came to the hospital. She looks forty, but she told me she was only
twenty-six." Miss Brent paused to steady her voice. "It's the curse of
my trade that it's always tempting me to interfere in cases where I can
do no possible good. The fact is, I'm not fit to be a nurse--I shall
live and die a wretched sentimentalist!" she ended, with an angry dash
at the tears on her veil.

Her companion walked on in silence till she had regained her composure.
Then he said: "What did you think of Westmore?"

"I think it's one of the worst places I ever saw--and I am not unused to
slums. It looks so dead. The slums of big cities are much more
cheerful."

He made no answer, and after a moment she asked: "Does the cotton-dust
always affect the lungs?"

"It's likely to, where there is the least phthisical tendency. But of
course the harm could be immensely reduced by taking up the old rough
floors which hold the dust, and by thorough cleanliness and
ventilation."

"What does the company do in such cases? Where an operative breaks down
at twenty-five?"

"The company says there was a phthisical tendency."

"And will they give nothing in return for the two lives they have
taken?"

"They will probably pay for Dillon's care at the hospital, and they have
taken the wife back as a scrubber."

"To clean those uncleanable floors? She's not fit for it!"

"She must work, fit for it or not; and there is less strain in scrubbing
than in bending over the looms or cards. The pay is lower, of course,
but she's very grateful for being taken back at all, now that she's no
longer a first-class worker."

Miss Brent's face glowed with a fine wrath. "She can't possibly stand
more than two or three months of it without breaking down!"

"Well, you see they've told her that in less than that time her husband
will be at work again."

"And what will the company do for them when the wife is a hopeless
invalid, and the husband a cripple?"

Amherst again uttered the dry laugh with which he had met her suggestion
of an emergency hospital. "I know what I should do if I could get
anywhere near Dillon--give him an overdose of morphine, and let the
widow collect his life-insurance, and make a fresh start."

She looked at him curiously. "Should you, I wonder?"

"If I saw the suffering as you see it, and knew the circumstances as I
know them, I believe I should feel justified--" He broke off. "In your
work, don't you ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?"

She mused. "One might...but perhaps the professional instinct to save
would always come first."

"To save--what? When all the good of life is gone?"

"I daresay," she sighed, "poor Dillon would do it himself if he
could--when he realizes that all the good _is_ gone."

"Yes, but he can't do it himself; and it's the irony of such cases that
his employers, after ruining his life, will do all they can to patch up
the ruins."

"But that at least ought to count in their favour."

"Perhaps; if--" He paused, as though reluctant to lay himself open once
more to the charge of uncharitableness; and suddenly she exclaimed,
looking about her: "I didn't notice we had walked so far down Maplewood
Avenue!"

They had turned a few minutes previously into the wide thoroughfare
crowning the high ground which is covered by the residential quarter of
Hanaford. Here the spacious houses, withdrawn behind shrubberies and
lawns, revealed in their silhouettes every form of architectural
experiment, from the symmetrical pre-Revolutionary structure, with its
classic portico and clipped box-borders, to the latest outbreak in
boulders and Moorish tiles.

Amherst followed his companion's glance with surprise. "We _have_ gone a
block or two out of our way. I always forget where I am when I'm talking
about anything that interests me."

Miss Brent looked at her watch. "My friends don't dine till seven, and I
can get home in time by taking a Grove Street car," she said.

"If you don't mind walking a little farther you can take a Liberty
Street car instead. They run oftener, and you will get home just as
soon."

She made a gesture of assent, and as they walked on he continued: "I
haven't yet explained why I am so anxious to get an unbiassed opinion of
Dillon's case."

She looked at him in surprise. "What you've told me about Dr. Disbrow
and your manager is surely enough."

"Well, hardly, considering that I am Truscomb's subordinate. I shouldn't
have committed a breach of professional etiquette, or asked you to do
so, if I hadn't a hope of bettering things; but I have, and that is why
I've held on at Westmore for the last few months, instead of getting out
of it altogether."

"I'm glad of that," she said quickly.

"The owner of the mills--young Richard Westmore--died last winter," he
went on, "and my hope--it's no more--is that the new broom may sweep a
little cleaner."

"Who is the new broom?"

"Westmore left everything to his widow, and she is coming here to-morrow
to look into the management of the mills."

"Coming? She doesn't live here, then?"

"At Hanaford? Heaven forbid! It's an anomaly nowadays for the employer
to live near the employed. The Westmores have always lived in New
York--and I believe they have a big place on Long Island."

"Well, at any rate she _is_ coming, and that ought to be a good sign.
Did she never show any interest in the mills during her husband's life?"

"Not as far as I know. I've been at Westmore three years, and she's not
been seen there in my time. She is very young, and Westmore himself
didn't care. It was a case of inherited money. He drew the dividends,
and Truscomb did the rest."

Miss Brent reflected. "I don't know much about the constitution of
companies--but I suppose Mrs. Westmore doesn't unite all the offices in
her own person. Is there no one to stand between Truscomb and the
operatives?"

"Oh, the company, on paper, shows the usual official hierarchy. Richard
Westmore, of course, was president, and since his death the former
treasurer--Halford Gaines--has replaced him, and his son, Westmore
Gaines, has been appointed treasurer. You can see by the names that it's
all in the family. Halford Gaines married a Miss Westmore, and
represents the clan at Hanaford--leads society, and keeps up the social
credit of the name. As treasurer, Mr. Halford Gaines kept strictly to
his special business, and always refused to interfere between Truscomb
and the operatives. As president he will probably follow the same
policy, the more so as it fits in with his inherited respect for the
_status quo_, and his blissful ignorance of economics."

"And the new treasurer--young Gaines? Is there no hope of his breaking
away from the family tradition?"

"Westy Gaines has a better head than his father; but he hates Hanaford
and the mills, and his chief object in life is to be taken for a New
Yorker. So far he hasn't been here much, except for the quarterly
meetings, and his routine work is done by another cousin--you perceive
that Westmore is a nest of nepotism."

Miss Brent's work among the poor had developed her interest in social
problems, and she followed these details attentively.

"Well, the outlook is not encouraging, but perhaps Mrs. Westmore's
coming will make a change. I suppose she has more power than any one."

"She might have, if she chose to exert it, for her husband was really
the whole company. The official cousins hold only a few shares apiece."

"Perhaps, then, her visit will open her eyes. Who knows but poor
Dillon's case may help others--prove a beautiful dispensation, as Mrs.
Ogan would say?"

"It does come terribly pat as an illustration of some of the abuses I
want to have remedied. The difficulty will be to get the lady's ear.
That's her house we're coming to, by the way."

An electric street-lamp irradiated the leafless trees and stone
gate-posts of the building before them. Though gardens extended behind
it, the house stood so near the pavement that only two short flights of
steps intervened between the gate-posts and the portico. Light shone
from every window of the pompous rusticated façade--in the turreted
"Tuscan villa" style of the 'fifties--and as Miss Brent and Amherst
approached, their advance was checked by a group of persons who were
just descending from two carriages at the door.

The lamp-light showed every detail of dress and countenance in the
party, which consisted of two men, one slightly lame, with a long white
moustache and a distinguished nose, the other short, lean and
professional, and of two ladies and their laden attendants.

"Why, that must be her party arriving!" Miss Brent exclaimed; and as she
spoke the younger of the two ladies, turning back to her maid, exposed
to the glare of the electric light a fair pale face shadowed by the
projection of her widow's veil.

"Is that Mrs. Westmore?" Miss Brent whispered; and as Amherst muttered:
"I suppose so; I've never seen her----" she continued excitedly: "She
looks so like--do you know what her name was before she married?"

He drew his brows together in a hopeless effort of remembrance. "I don't
know--I must have heard--but I never can recall people's names."

"That's bad, for a leader of men!" she said mockingly, and he answered,
as though touched on a sore point: "I mean people who don't count. I
never forget an operative's name or face."

"One can never tell who may be going to count," she rejoined
sententiously.

He dwelt on this in silence while they walked on catching as they
passed a glimpse of the red-carpeted Westmore hall on which the glass
doors were just being closed. At length he roused himself to ask: "Does
Mrs. Westmore look like some one you know?"

"I fancied so--a girl who was at the Sacred Heart in Paris with me. But
isn't this my corner?" she exclaimed, as they turned into another
street, down which a laden car was descending.

Its approach left them time for no more than a hurried hand-clasp, and
when Miss Brent had been absorbed into the packed interior her
companion, as his habit was, stood for a while where she had left him,
gazing at some indefinite point in space; then, waking to a sudden
consciousness of his surroundings, he walked off toward the centre of
the town.

At the junction of two business streets he met an empty car marked
"Westmore," and springing into it, seated himself in a corner and drew
out a pocket Shakespeare. He read on, indifferent to his surroundings,
till the car left the asphalt streets and illuminated shop-fronts for a
grey intermediate region of mud and macadam. Then he pocketed his volume
and sat looking out into the gloom.

The houses grew less frequent, with darker gaps of night between; and
the rare street-lamps shone on cracked pavements, crooked
telegraph-poles, hoardings tapestried with patent-medicine posters, and
all the mean desolation of an American industrial suburb. Farther on
there came a weed-grown field or two, then a row of operatives' houses,
the showy gables of the "Eldorado" road-house--the only building in
Westmore on which fresh paint was freely lavished--then the company
"store," the machine shops and other out-buildings, the vast forbidding
bulk of the factories looming above the river-bend, and the sudden
neatness of the manager's turf and privet hedges. The scene was so
familiar to Amherst that he had lost the habit of comparison, and his
absorption in the moral and material needs of the workers sometimes made
him forget the outward setting of their lives. But to-night he recalled
the nurse's comment--"it looks so dead"--and the phrase roused him to a
fresh perception of the scene. With sudden disgust he saw the sordidness
of it all--the poor monotonous houses, the trampled grass-banks, the
lean dogs prowling in refuse-heaps, the reflection of a crooked gas-lamp
in a stagnant loop of the river; and he asked himself how it was
possible to put any sense of moral beauty into lives bounded forever by
the low horizon of the factory. There is a fortuitous ugliness that has
life and hope in it: the ugliness of overcrowded city streets, of the
rush and drive of packed activities; but this out-spread meanness of the
suburban working colony, uncircumscribed by any pressure of surrounding
life, and sunk into blank acceptance of its isolation, its banishment
from beauty and variety and surprise, seemed to Amherst the very
negation of hope and life.

"She's right," he mused--"it's dead--stone dead: there isn't a drop of
wholesome blood left in it."

The Moosuc River valley, in the hollow of which, for that river's sake,
the Westmore mills had been planted, lingered in the memory of
pre-industrial Hanaford as the pleasantest suburb of the town. Here,
beyond a region of orchards and farm-houses, several "leading citizens"
had placed, above the river-bank, their prim wood-cut "residences," with
porticoes and terraced lawns; and from the chief of these, Hopewood,
brought into the Westmore family by the Miss Hope who had married an
earlier Westmore, the grim mill-village had been carved. The pillared
"residences" had, after this, inevitably fallen to base uses; but the
old house at Hopewood, in its wooded grounds, remained, neglected but
intact, beyond the first bend of the river, deserted as a dwelling but
"held" in anticipation of rising values, when the inevitable growth of
Westmore should increase the demand for small building lots. Whenever
Amherst's eyes were refreshed by the hanging foliage above the roofs of
Westmore, he longed to convert the abandoned country-seat into a park
and playground for the mill-hands; but he knew that the company counted
on the gradual sale of Hopewood as a source of profit. No--the mill-town
would not grow beautiful as it grew larger--rather, in obedience to the
grim law of industrial prosperity, it would soon lose its one lingering
grace and spread out in unmitigated ugliness, devouring green fields and
shaded slopes like some insect-plague consuming the land. The conditions
were familiar enough to Amherst; and their apparent inevitableness
mocked the hopes he had based on Mrs. Westmore's arrival.

"Where every stone is piled on another, through the whole stupid
structure of selfishness and egotism, how can one be pulled out without
making the whole thing topple? And whatever they're blind to, they
always see that," he mused, reaching up for the strap of the car.

He walked a few yards beyond the manager's house, and turned down a side
street lined with scattered cottages. Approaching one of these by a
gravelled path he pushed open the door, and entered a sitting-room where
a green-shaded lamp shone pleasantly on bookshelves and a crowded
writing-table.

A brisk little woman in black, laying down the evening paper as she
rose, lifted her hands to his tall shoulders.

"Well, mother," he said, stooping to her kiss.

"You're late, John," she smiled back at him, not reproachfully, but with
affection.

She was a wonderfully compact and active creature, with face so young
and hair so white that she looked as unreal as a stage mother till a
close view revealed the fine lines that experience had drawn about her
mouth and eyes. The eyes themselves, brightly black and glancing, had
none of the veiled depths of her son's gaze. Their look was outward, on
a world which had dealt her hard blows and few favours, but in which her
interest was still fresh, amused and unabated.

Amherst glanced at his watch. "Never mind--Duplain will be later still.
I had to go into Hanaford, and he is replacing me at the office."

"So much the better, dear: we can have a minute to ourselves. Sit down
and tell me what kept you."

She picked up her knitting as she spoke, having the kind of hands that
find repose in ceaseless small activities. Her son could not remember a
time when he had not seen those small hands in motion--shaping garments,
darning rents, repairing furniture, exploring the inner economy of
clocks. "I make a sort of rag-carpet of the odd minutes," she had once
explained to a friend who wondered at her turning to her needlework in
the moment's interval between other tasks.

Amherst threw himself wearily into a chair. "I was trying to find out
something about Dillon's case," he said.

His mother turned a quick glance toward the door, rose to close it, and
reseated herself.

"Well?"

"I managed to have a talk with his nurse when she went off duty this
evening."

"The nurse? I wonder you could get her to speak."

"Luckily she's not the regular incumbent, but a volunteer who happened
to be here on a visit. As it was, I had some difficulty in making her
talk--till I told her of Disbrow's letter."

Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright glance from the needles. "He's very bad,
then?"

"Hopelessly maimed!"

She shivered and cast down her eyes. "Do you suppose she really knows?"

"She struck me as quite competent to judge."

"A volunteer, you say, here on a visit? What is her name?"

He raised his head with a vague look. "I never thought of asking her."

Mrs. Amherst laughed. "How like you! Did she say with whom she was
staying?"

"I think she said in Oak Street--but she didn't mention any name."

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 to-night, 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 black-listed 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.

Mr. Langhope, who sat smoking, with one faultlessly-clad leg crossed on
the other, and his ebony stick reposing against the arm of his chair,
raised his clear ironical eyes to her face.

"As an archæologist," he said, with a comprehensive wave of his hand, "I
find it positively interesting. I should really like to come here and
dig."

There were no lamps in the room, and the numerous gas-jets of the
chandelier shed their lights impartially on ponderously framed canvases
of the Bay of Naples and the Hudson in Autumn, on Carrara busts and
bronze Indians on velvet pedestals.

"All this," murmured Mr. Langhope, "is getting to be as rare as the
giant sequoias. In another fifty years we shall have collectors fighting
for that Bay of Naples."

Bessy Westmore turned from him impatiently. When she felt deeply on any
subject her father's flippancy annoyed her.

"_You_ can see, Maria," she said, seating herself beside the other lady
of the party, "why I couldn't possibly live here."

Mrs. Eustace Ansell, immediately after dinner, had bent her slender back
above the velvet-covered writing-table, where an inkstand of Vienna
ormolu offered its empty cup to her pen. Being habitually charged with a
voluminous correspondence, she had foreseen this contingency and met it
by despatching her maid for her own writing-case, which was now
outspread before her in all its complex neatness; but at Bessy's appeal
she wiped her pen, and turned a sympathetic gaze on her companion.

Mrs. Ansell's face drew all its charm from its adaptability. It was a
different face to each speaker: now kindling with irony, now gently
maternal, now charged with abstract meditation--and few paused to
reflect that, in each case, it was merely the mirror held up to some one
else's view of life.

"It needs doing over," she admitted, following the widow's melancholy
glance about the room. "But you are a spoilt child to complain. Think of
having a house of your own to come to, instead of having to put up at
the Hanaford hotel!"

Mrs. Westmore's attention was arrested by the first part of the reply.

"Doing over? Why in the world should I do it over? No one could expect
me to come here _now_--could they, Mr. Tredegar?" she exclaimed,
transferring her appeal to the fourth member of the party.

Mr. Tredegar, the family lawyer, who had deemed it his duty to accompany
the widow on her visit of inspection, was strolling up and down the room
with short pompous steps, a cigar between his lips, and his arms behind
him. He cocked his sparrow-like head, scanned the offending apartment,
and terminated his survey by resting his eyes on Mrs. Westmore's
charming petulant face.

"It all depends," he replied axiomatically, "how large an income you
require."

Mr. Tredegar uttered this remark with the air of one who pronounces on
an important point in law: his lightest observation seemed a decision
handed down from the bench to which he had never ascended. He restored
the cigar to his lips, and sought approval in Mrs. Ansell's expressive
eye.

"Ah, that's it, Bessy. You've that to remember," the older lady
murmured, as if struck by the profundity of the remark.

Mrs. Westmore made an impatient gesture. "We've always had money
enough--Dick was perfectly satisfied." Her voice trembled a little on
her husband's name. "And you don't know what the place is like by
daylight--and the people who come to call!"

"Of course you needn't see any one now, dear," Mrs. Ansell reminded her,
"except the Halford Gaineses."

"I am sure they're bad enough. Juliana Gaines will say: 'My dear, is
that the way widows' veils are worn in New York this autumn?' and
Halford will insist on our going to one of those awful family dinners,
all Madeira and terrapin."

"It's too early for terrapin," Mrs. Ansell smiled consolingly; but Bessy
had reverted to her argument. "Besides, what difference would my coming
here make? I shall never understand anything about business," she
declared.

Mr. Tredegar pondered, and once more removed his cigar. "The necessity
has never arisen. But now that you find yourself in almost sole control
of a large property----"

Mr. Langhope laughed gently. "Apply yourself, Bessy. Bring your masterly
intellect to bear on the industrial problem."

Mrs. Ansell restored the innumerable implements to her writing-case, and
laid her arm with a caressing gesture on Mrs. Westmore's shoulder.
"Don't tease her. She's tired, and she misses the baby."

"I shall get a telegram tomorrow morning," exclaimed the young mother,
brightening.

"Of course you will. 'Cicely has just eaten two boiled eggs and a bowl
of porridge, and is bearing up wonderfully.'"

She drew Mrs. Westmore persuasively to her feet, but the widow refused
to relinquish her hold on her grievance.

"You all think I'm extravagant and careless about money," she broke out,
addressing the room in general from the shelter of Mrs. Ansell's
embrace; "but I know one thing: If I had my way I should begin to
economize by selling this horrible house, instead of leaving it shut up
from one year's end to another."

Her father looked up: proposals of retrenchment always struck him as
business-like when they did not affect his own expenditure. "What do you
think of that, eh, Tredegar?"

The eminent lawyer drew in his thin lips. "From the point of view of
policy, I think unfavourably of it," he pronounced.

Bessy's face clouded, and Mrs. Ansell argued gently: "Really, it's too
late to look so far into the future. Remember, my dear, that we are due
at the mills tomorrow at ten."

The reminder that she must rise early had the effect of hastening Mrs.
Westmore's withdrawal, and the two ladies, after an exchange of
goodnights, left the men to their cigars.

Mr. Langhope was the first to speak.

"Bessy's as hopelessly vague about business as I am, Tredegar. Why the
deuce Westmore left her everything outright--but he was only a heedless
boy himself."

"Yes. The way he allowed things to go, it's a wonder there was anything
to leave. This Truscomb must be an able fellow."

"Devoted to Dick's interests, I've always understood."

"He makes the mills pay well, at any rate, and that's not so easy
nowadays. But on general principles it's as well he should see that we
mean to look into everything thoroughly. Of course Halford Gaines will
never be more than a good figure-head, but Truscomb must be made to
understand that Mrs. Westmore intends to interest herself personally in
the business."

"Oh, by all means--of course--" Mr. Langhope assented, his light smile
stiffening into a yawn at the mere suggestion.

He rose with an effort, supporting himself on his stick. "I think I'll
turn in myself. There's not a readable book in that God-forsaken
library, and I believe Maria Ansell has gone off with my volume of
Loti."

       *       *       *       *       *

The next morning, when Amherst presented himself at the Westmore door,
he had decided to follow his chief's instructions to the letter, and ask
for Mr. Langhope only. The decision had cost him a struggle, for his
heart was big with its purpose; but though he knew that he must soon
place himself in open opposition to Truscomb, he recognized the prudence
of deferring the declaration of war as long as possible.

On his round of the mills, that morning, he had paused in the room where
Mrs. Dillon knelt beside her mop and pail, and had found her, to his
surprise, comparatively reassured and cheerful. Dr. Disbrow, she told
him, had been in the previous evening, and had told her to take heart
about Jim, and left her enough money to get along for a week--and a
wonderful new cough-mixture that he'd put up for her special. Amherst
found it difficult to listen calmly, with the nurse's words still in his
ears, and the sight before him of Mrs. Dillon's lean shoulder-blades
travelling painfully up and down with the sweep of the mop.

"I don't suppose that cost Truscomb ten dollars," he said to himself, as
the lift lowered him to the factory door; but another voice argued that
he had no right to accuse Disbrow of acting as his brother-in-law's
agent, when the gift to Mrs. Dillon might have been prompted by his own
kindness of heart.

"And what prompted the lie about her husband? Well, perhaps he's an
incurable optimist," he summed up, springing into the Hanaford car.

By the time he reached Mrs. Westmore's door his wrath had subsided, and
he felt that he had himself well in hand. He had taken unusual pains
with his appearance that morning--or rather his mother, learning of the
errand on which Truscomb had sent him, had laid out his
carefully-brushed Sunday clothes, and adjusted his tie with skilful
fingers. "You'd really be handsome, Johnny, if you were only a little
vainer," she said, pushing him away to survey the result; and when he
stared at her, repeating: "I never heard that vanity made a man
better-looking," she responded gaily: "Oh, up to a certain point,
because it teaches him how to use what he's got. So remember," she
charged him, as he smiled and took up his hat, "that you're going to see
a pretty young woman, and that you're not a hundred years old yourself."

"I'll try to," he answered, humouring her, "but as I've been forbidden
to ask for her, I am afraid your efforts will be wasted."

The servant to whom he gave his message showed him into the library,
with a request that he should wait; and there, to his surprise, he
found, not the white-moustached gentleman whom he had guessed the night
before to be Mr. Langhope, but a young lady in deep black, who turned on
him a look of not unfriendly enquiry.

It was not Bessy's habit to anticipate the clock; but her distaste for
her surroundings, and the impatience to have done with the tedious
duties awaiting her, had sent her downstairs before the rest of the
party. Her life had been so free from tiresome obligations that she had
but a small stock of patience to meet them with; and already, after a
night at Hanaford, she was pining to get back to the comforts of her own
country-house, the soft rut of her daily habits, the funny chatter of
her little girl, the long stride of her Irish hunter across the
Hempstead plains--to everything, in short, that made it conceivably
worth while to get up in the morning.

The servant who ushered in Amherst, thinking the room empty, had not
mentioned his name; and for a moment he and his hostess examined each
other in silence, Bessy puzzled at the unannounced appearance of a
good-looking young man who might have been some one she had met and
forgotten, while Amherst felt his self-possession slipping away into the
depths of a pair of eyes so dark-lashed and deeply blue that his only
thought was one of wonder at his previous indifference to women's eyes.

"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.




IV

JOHN AMHERST was no one-sided idealist. He felt keenly the growing
complexity of the relation between employer and worker, the seeming
hopelessness of permanently harmonizing their claims, the recurring
necessity of fresh compromises and adjustments. He hated rant, demagogy,
the rash formulating of emotional theories; and his contempt for bad
logic and subjective judgments led him to regard with distrust the
panaceas offered for the cure of economic evils. But his heart ached
for the bitter throes with which the human machine moves on. He felt the
menace of industrial conditions when viewed collectively, their
poignancy when studied in the individual lives of the toilers among whom
his lot was cast; and clearly as he saw the need of a philosophic survey
of the question, he was sure that only through sympathy with its
personal, human side could a solution be reached. The disappearance of
the old familiar contact between master and man seemed to him one of the
great wrongs of the new industrial situation. That the breach must be
farther widened by the ultimate substitution of the stock-company for
the individual employer--a fact obvious to any student of economic
tendencies--presented to Amherst's mind one of the most painful problems
in the scheme of social readjustment. But it was characteristic of him
to dwell rather on the removal of immediate difficulties than in the
contemplation of those to come, and while the individual employer was
still to be reckoned with, the main thing was to bring him closer to his
workers. Till he entered personally into their hardships and
aspirations--till he learned what they wanted and why they wanted
it--Amherst believed that no mere law-making, however enlightened, could
create a wholesome relation between the two.

This feeling was uppermost as he sat with Mrs. Westmore in the carriage
which was carrying them to the mills. He had meant to take the trolley
back to Westmore, but at a murmured word from Mr. Tredegar Bessy had
offered him a seat at her side, leaving others to follow. This
culmination of his hopes--the unlooked-for chance of a half-hour alone
with her--left Amherst oppressed with the swiftness of the minutes. He
had so much to say--so much to prepare her for--yet how begin, while he
was in utter ignorance of her character and her point of view, and while
her lovely nearness left him so little chance of perceiving anything
except itself?

But he was not often the victim of his sensations, and presently there
emerged, out of the very consciousness of her grace and her
completeness, a clearer sense of the conditions which, in a measure, had
gone to produce them. Her dress could not have hung in such subtle
folds, her white chin have nestled in such rich depths of fur, the
pearls in her ears have given back the light from such pure curves, if
thin shoulders in shapeless gingham had not bent, day in, day out, above
the bobbins and carders, and weary ears throbbed even at night with the
tumult of the looms. Amherst, however, felt no sensational resentment at
the contrast. He had lived too much with ugliness and want not to
believe in human nature's abiding need of their opposite. He was glad
there was room for such beauty in the world, and sure that its purpose
was an ameliorating one, if only it could be used as a beautiful spirit
would use it.

The carriage had turned into one of the nondescript thoroughfares, half
incipient street, half decaying lane, which dismally linked the
mill-village to Hanaford. Bessy looked out on the ruts, the hoardings,
the starved trees dangling their palsied leaves in the radiant October
light; then she sighed: "What a good day for a gallop!"

Amherst felt a momentary chill, but the naturalness of the exclamation
disarmed him, and the words called up thrilling memories of his own
college days, when he had ridden his grandfather's horses in the famous
hunting valley not a hundred miles from Hanaford.

Bessy met his smile with a glow of understanding. "You like riding too,
I'm sure?"

"I used to; but I haven't been in the saddle for years. Factory managers
don't keep hunters," he said laughing.

Her murmur of embarrassment showed that she took this as an apologetic
allusion to his reduced condition, and in his haste to correct this
impression he added: "If I regretted anything in my other life, it would
certainly be a gallop on a day like this; but I chose my trade
deliberately, and I've never been sorry for my choice."

He had hardly spoken when he felt the inappropriateness of this avowal;
but her prompt response showed him, a moment later, that it was, after
all, the straightest way to his end.

"You find the work interesting? I'm sure it must be. You'll think me
very ignorant--my husband and I came here so seldom...I feel as if I
ought to know so much more about it," she explained.

At last the note for which he waited had been struck. "Won't you try
to--now you're here? There's so much worth knowing," he broke out
impetuously.

Mrs. Westmore coloured, but rather with surprise than displeasure. "I'm
very stupid--I've no head for business--but I will try to," she said.

"It's not business that I mean; it's the personal relation--just the
thing the business point of view leaves out. Financially, I don't
suppose your mills could be better run; but there are over seven hundred
women working in them, and there's so much to be done, just for them and
their children."

He caught a faint hint of withdrawal in her tone. "I have always
understood that Mr. Truscomb did everything----"

Amherst flushed; but he was beyond caring for the personal rebuff. "Do
you leave it to your little girl's nurses to do everything for her?" he
asked.

Her surprise seemed about to verge on annoyance: he saw the preliminary
ruffling of the woman who is put to the trouble of defending her
dignity. "Really, I don't see--" she began with distant politeness; then
her face changed and melted, and again her blood spoke for her before
her lips.

"I am glad you told me that, Mr. Amherst. Of course I want to do
whatever I can. I should like you to point out everything----"

Amherst's resolve had been taken while she spoke. He _would_ point out
everything, would stretch his opportunity to its limit. All thoughts of
personal prudence were flung to the winds--her blush and tone had routed
the waiting policy. He would declare war on Truscomb at once, and take
the chance of dismissal. At least, before he went he would have brought
this exquisite creature face to face with the wrongs from which her
luxuries were drawn, and set in motion the regenerating impulses of
indignation and pity. He did not stop to weigh the permanent advantage
of this course. His only feeling was that the chance would never again
be given him--that if he let her go away, back to her usual life, with
eyes unopened and heart untouched, there would be no hope of her ever
returning. It was far better that he should leave for good, and that she
should come back, as come back she must, more and more often, if once
she could be made to feel the crying need of her presence.

But where was he to begin? How give her even a glimpse of the packed and
intricate situation?

"Mrs. Westmore," he said, "there's no time to say much now, but before
we get to the mills I want to ask you a favour. If, as you go through
them, you see anything that seems to need explaining, will you let me
come and tell you about it tonight? I say tonight," he added, meeting
her look of enquiry, "because later--tomorrow even--I might not have the
chance. There are some things--a good many--in the management of the
mills that Mr. Truscomb doesn't see as I do. I don't mean business
questions: wages and dividends and so on--those are out of my province.
I speak merely in the line of my own work--my care of the hands, and
what I believe they need and don't get under the present system.
Naturally, if Mr. Truscomb were well, I shouldn't have had this chance
of putting the case to you; but since it's come my way, I must seize it
and take the consequences."

Even as he spoke, by a swift reaction of thought, those consequences
rose before him in all their seriousness. It was not only, or chiefly,
that he feared to lose his place; though he knew his mother had not
spoken lightly in instancing the case of the foreman whom Truscomb, to
gratify a personal spite, had for months kept out of a job in his trade.
And there were special reasons why Amherst should heed her warning. In
adopting a manual trade, instead of one of the gentlemanly professions
which the men of her family had always followed, he had not only
disappointed her hopes, and to a great extent thrown away the benefits
of the education she had pinched herself to give him, but had disturbed
all the habits of her life by removing her from her normal surroundings
to the depressing exile of a factory-settlement. However much he blamed
himself for exacting this sacrifice, it had been made so cheerfully that
the consciousness of it never clouded his life with his mother; but her
self-effacement made him the more alive to his own obligations, and
having placed her in a difficult situation he had always been careful
not to increase its difficulties by any imprudence in his conduct toward
his employers. Yet, grave as these considerations were, they were really
less potent than his personal desire to remain at Westmore. Lightly as
he had just resolved to risk the chance of dismissal, all his future was
bound up in the hope of retaining his place. His heart was in the work
at Westmore, and the fear of not being able to get other employment was
a small factor in his intense desire to keep his post. What he really
wanted was to speak out, and yet escape the consequences: by some
miraculous reversal of probability to retain his position and yet effect
Truscomb's removal. The idea was so fantastic that he felt it merely as
a quickening of all his activities, a tremendous pressure of will along
undetermined lines. He had no wish to take the manager's place; but his
dream was to see Truscomb superseded by a man of the new school, in
sympathy with the awakening social movement--a man sufficiently
practical to "run" the mills successfully, yet imaginative enough to
regard that task as the least of his duties. He saw the promise of such
a man in Louis Duplain, the overseer who boarded with Mrs. Amherst: a
young fellow of Alsatian extraction, a mill-hand from childhood, who had
worked at his trade in Europe as well as in America, and who united with
more manual skill, and a greater nearness to the workman's standpoint,
all Amherst's enthusiasm for the experiments in social betterment that
were making in some of the English and continental factories. His
strongest wish was to see such a man as Duplain in control at Westmore
before he himself turned to the larger work which he had begun to see
before him as the sequel to his factory-training.

All these thoughts swept through him in the instant's pause before Mrs.
Westmore, responding to his last appeal, said with a graceful eagerness:
"Yes, you must come tonight. I want to hear all you can tell me--and if
there is anything wrong you must show me how I can make it better."

"I'll show her, and Truscomb shan't turn me out for it," was the vow he
passionately registered as the carriage drew up at the office-door of
the main building.

How this impossible result was to be achieved he had no farther time to
consider, for in another moment the rest of the party had entered the
factory with them, and speech was followed up in the roar of the
machinery.

Amherst's zeal for his cause was always quickened by the sight of the
mills in action. He loved the work itself as much as he hated the
conditions under which it was done; and he longed to see on the
operatives' faces something of the ardour that lit up his own when he
entered the work-rooms. It was this passion for machinery that at school
had turned him from his books, at college had drawn him to the courses
least in the line of his destined profession; and it always seized on
him afresh when he was face to face with the monstrous energies of the
mills. It was not only the sense of power that thrilled him--he felt a
beauty in the ordered activity of the whole intricate organism, in the
rhythm of dancing bobbins and revolving cards, the swift continuous
outpour of doublers and ribbon-laps, the steady ripple of the long
ply-frames, the terrible gnashing play of the looms--all these varying
subordinate motions, gathered up into the throb of the great engines
which fed the giant's arteries, and were in turn ruled by the invisible
action of quick thought and obedient hands, always produced in Amherst a
responsive rush of life.

He knew this sensation was too specialized to affect his companions; but
he expected Mrs. Westmore to be all the more alive to the other
side--the dark side of monotonous human toil, of the banquet of flesh
and blood and brain perpetually served up to the monster whose
insatiable jaws the looms so grimly typified. Truscomb, as he had told
her, was a good manager from the profit-taking standpoint. Since it was
profitable to keep the machinery in order, he maintained throughout the
factory a high standard of mechanical supervision, except where one or
two favoured overseers--for Truscomb was given to favoritism--shirked
the duties of their departments. But it was of the essence of Truscomb's
policy--and not the least of the qualities which made him a "paying"
manager--that he saved money scrupulously where its outlay would not
have resulted in larger earnings. To keep the floors scrubbed, the
cotton-dust swept up, the rooms freshly whitewashed and well-ventilated,
far from adding the smallest fraction to the quarterly dividends, would
have deducted from them the slight cost of this additional labour; and
Truscomb therefore economized on scrubbers, sweepers and window-washers,
and on all expenses connected with improved ventilation and other
hygienic precautions. Though the whole factory was over-crowded, the
newest buildings were more carefully planned, and had the usual sanitary
improvements; but the old mills had been left in their original state,
and even those most recently built were fast lapsing into squalor. It
was no wonder, therefore, that workers imprisoned within such walls
should reflect their long hours of deadening toil in dull eyes and
anæmic skins, and in the dreary lassitude with which they bent to their
tasks.

Surely, Amherst argued, Mrs. Westmore must feel this; must feel it all
the more keenly, coming from an atmosphere so different, from a life
where, as he instinctively divined, all was in harmony with her own
graceful person. But a deep disappointment awaited him. He was still
under the spell of their last moments in the carriage, when her face and
voice had promised so much, when she had seemed so deeply, if vaguely,
stirred by his appeal. But as they passed from one resounding room to
the other--from the dull throb of the carding-room, the groan of the
ply-frames, the long steady pound of the slashers, back to the angry
shriek of the fierce unappeasable looms--the light faded from her eyes
and she looked merely bewildered and stunned.

Amherst, hardened to the din of the factory, could not measure its
effect on nerves accustomed to the subdued sounds and spacious
stillnesses which are the last refinement of luxury. Habit had made him
unconscious of that malicious multiplication and subdivision of noise
that kept every point of consciousness vibrating to a different note, so
that while one set of nerves was torn as with pincers by the dominant
scream of the looms, others were thrilled with a separate pain by the
ceaseless accompaniment of drumming, hissing, grating and crashing that
shook the great building. Amherst felt this tumult only as part of the
atmosphere of the mills; and to ears trained like his own he could make
his voice heard without difficulty. But his attempts at speech were
unintelligible to Mrs. Westmore and her companions, and after vainly
trying to communicate with him by signs they hurried on as if to escape
as quickly as possible from the pursuing whirlwind.

Amherst could not allow for the depressing effect of this enforced
silence. He did not see that if Bessy could have questioned him the
currents of sympathy might have remained open between them, whereas,
compelled to walk in silence through interminable ranks of meaningless
machines, to which the human workers seemed mere automatic appendages,
she lost all perception of what the scene meant. He had forgotten, too,
that the swift apprehension of suffering in others is as much the result
of training as the immediate perception of beauty. Both perceptions may
be inborn, but if they are not they can be developed only through the
discipline of experience.

"That girl in the hospital would have seen it all," he reflected, as the
vision of Miss Brent's small incisive profile rose before him; but the
next moment he caught the light on Mrs. Westmore's hair, as she bent
above a card, and the paler image faded like a late moon in the sunrise.

Meanwhile Mrs. Ansell, seeing that the detailed inspection of the
buildings was as trying to Mr. Langhope's lameness as to his daughter's
nerves, had proposed to turn back with him and drive to Mrs. Amherst's,
where he might leave her to call while the others were completing their
rounds. It was one of Mrs. Ansell's gifts to detect the first symptoms
of _ennui_ in her companions, and produce a remedy as patly as old
ladies whisk out a scent-bottle or a cough-lozenge; and Mr. Langhope's
look of relief showed the timeliness of her suggestion.

Amherst was too preoccupied to wonder how his mother would take this
visit; but he welcomed Mr. Langhope's departure, hoping that the
withdrawal of his ironic smile would leave his daughter open to gentler
influences. Mr. Tredegar, meanwhile, was projecting his dry glance over
the scene, trying to converse by signs with the overseers of the
different rooms, and pausing now and then to contemplate, not so much
the workers themselves as the special tasks which engaged them.

How these spectators of the party's progress were affected by Mrs.
Westmore's appearance, even Amherst, for all his sympathy with their
views, could not detect. They knew that she was the new owner, that a
disproportionate amount of the result of their toil would in future pass
through her hands, spread carpets for her steps, and hang a setting of
beauty about her eyes; but the knowledge seemed to produce no special
interest in her personality. A change of employer was not likely to make
any change in their lot: their welfare would probably continue to depend
on Truscomb's favour. The men hardly raised their heads as Mrs. Westmore
passed; the women stared, but with curiosity rather than interest; and
Amherst could not tell whether their sullenness reacted on Mrs.
Westmore, or whether they were unconsciously chilled by her
indifference. The result was the same: the distance between them seemed
to increase instead of diminishing; and he smiled ironically to think of
the form his appeal had taken--"If you see anything that seems to need
explaining." Why, she saw nothing--nothing but the greasy floor under
her feet, the cotton-dust in her eyes, the dizzy incomprehensible
whirring of innumerable belts and wheels! Once out of it all, she would
make haste to forget the dreary scene without pausing to ask for any
explanation of its dreariness.

In the intensity of his disappointment he sought a pretext to cut short
the tour of the buildings, that he might remove his eyes from the face
he had so vainly watched for any sign of awakening. And then, as he
despaired of it, the change came.

They had entered the principal carding-room, and were half-way down its
long central passage, when Mr. Tredegar, who led the procession, paused
before one of the cards.

"What's that?" he asked, pointing to a ragged strip of black cloth tied
conspicuously to the frame of the card.

The overseer of the room, a florid young man with dissipated eyes, who,
at Amherst's signal, had attached himself to the party, stopped short
and turned a furious glance on the surrounding operatives.

"What in hell...? It's the first I seen of it," he exclaimed, making an
ineffectual attempt to snatch the mourning emblem from its place.

At the same instant the midday whistle boomed through the building, and
at the signal the machinery stopped, and silence fell on the mills. The
more distant workers at once left their posts to catch up the hats and
coats heaped untidily in the corners; but those nearer by, attracted by
the commotion around the card, stood spell-bound, fixing the visitors
with a dull stare.

Amherst had reddened to the roots of his hair. He knew in a flash what
the token signified, and the sight stirred his pity; but it also jarred
on his strong sense of discipline, and he turned sternly to the
operatives.

"What does this mean?"

There was a short silence; then one of the hands, a thin bent man with
mystic eyes, raised his head and spoke.

"We done that for Dillon," he said.

Amherst's glance swept the crowded faces. "But Dillon was not killed,"
he exclaimed, while the overseer, drawing out his pen-knife, ripped off
the cloth and tossed it contemptuously into a heap of cotton-refuse at
his feet.

"Might better ha' been," came from another hand; and a deep "That's so"
of corroboration ran through the knot of workers.

Amherst felt a touch on his arm, and met Mrs. Westmore's eyes. "What has
happened? What do they mean?" she asked in a startled voice.

"There was an accident here two days ago: a man got caught in the card
behind him, and his right hand was badly crushed."

Mr. Tredegar intervened with his dry note of command. "How serious is
the accident? How did it happen?" he enquired.

"Through the man's own carelessness--ask the manager," the overseer
interposed before Amherst could answer.

A deep murmur of dissent ran through the crowd, but Amherst, without
noticing the overseer's reply, said to Mr. Tredegar: "He's at the Hope
Hospital. He will lose his hand, and probably the whole arm."

He had not meant to add this last phrase. However strongly his
sympathies were aroused, it was against his rule, at such a time, to say
anything which might inflame the quick passions of the workers: he had
meant to make light of the accident, and dismiss the operatives with a
sharp word of reproof. But Mrs. Westmore's face was close to his: he saw
the pity in her eyes, and feared, if he checked its expression, that he
might never again have the chance of calling it forth.

"His right arm? How terrible! But then he will never be able to work
again!" she exclaimed, in all the horror of a first confrontation with
the inexorable fate of the poor.

Her eyes turned from Amherst and rested on the faces pressing about her.
There were many women's faces among them--the faces of fagged
middle-age, and of sallow sedentary girlhood. For the first time Mrs.
Westmore seemed to feel the bond of blood between herself and these dim
creatures of the underworld: as Amherst watched her the lovely miracle
was wrought. Her pallour gave way to a quick rush of colour, her eyes
widened like a frightened child's, and two tears rose and rolled slowly
down her face.

"Oh, why wasn't I told? Is he married? Has he children? What does it
matter whose fault it was?" she cried, her questions pouring out
disconnectedly on a wave of anger and compassion.

"It warn't his fault.... The cards are too close.... It'll happen
again.... He's got three kids at home," broke from the operatives; and
suddenly a voice exclaimed "Here's his wife now," and the crowd divided
to make way for Mrs. Dillon, who, passing through the farther end of the
room, had been waylaid and dragged toward the group.

She hung back, shrinking from the murderous machine, which she beheld
for the first time since her husband's accident; then she saw Amherst,
guessed the identity of the lady at his side, and flushed up to her
haggard forehead. Mrs. Dillon had been good-looking in her earlier
youth, and sufficient prettiness lingered in her hollow-cheeked face to
show how much more had been sacrificed to sickness and unwholesome toil.

"Oh, ma'am, ma'am, it warn't Jim's fault--there ain't a steadier man
living. The cards is too crowded," she sobbed out.

Some of the other women began to cry: a wave of sympathy ran through
the circle, and Mrs. Westmore moved forward with an answering
exclamation. "You poor creature...you poor creature...." She opened her
arms to Mrs. Dillon, and the scrubber's sobs were buried on her
employer's breast.

"I will go to the hospital--I will come and see you--I will see that
everything is done," Bessy reiterated. "But why are you here? How is it
that you have had to leave your children?" She freed herself to turn a
reproachful glance on Amherst. "You don't mean to tell me that, at such
a time, you keep the poor woman at work?"

"Mrs. Dillon has not been working here lately," Amherst answered. "The
manager took her back to-day at her own request, that she might earn
something while her husband was in hospital."

Mrs. Westmore's eyes shone indignantly. "Earn something? But surely----"

She met a silencing look from Mr. Tredegar, who had stepped between Mrs.
Dillon and herself.

"My dear child, no one doubts--none of these good people doubt--that you
will look into the case, and do all you can to alleviate it; but let me
suggest that this is hardly the place----"

She turned from him with an appealing glance at Amherst.

"I think," the latter said, as their eyes met, "that you had better let
me dismiss the hands: they have only an hour at midday."

She signed her assent, and he turned to the operatives and said quietly:
"You have heard Mrs. Westmore's promise; now take yourselves off, and
give her a clear way to the stairs."

They dropped back, and Mr. Tredegar drew Bessy's arm through his; but as
he began to move away she turned and laid her hand on Mrs. Dillon's
shoulder.

"You must not stay here--you must go back to the children. I will make
it right with Mr. Truscomb," she said in a reassuring whisper; then,
through her tears, she smiled a farewell at the lingering knot of
operatives, and followed her companions to the door.

In silence they descended the many stairs and crossed the shabby
unfenced grass-plot between the mills and the manager's office. It was
not till they reached the carriage that Mrs. Westmore spoke.

"But Maria is waiting for us--we must call for her!" she said, rousing
herself; and as Amherst opened the carriage-door she added: "You will
show us the way? You will drive with us?"

During the drive Bessy remained silent, as if re-absorbed in the
distress of the scene she had just witnessed; and Amherst found himself
automatically answering Mr. Tredegar's questions, while his own mind
had no room for anything but the sense of her tremulous lips and of her
eyes enlarged by tears. He had been too much engrossed in the momentous
issues of her visit to the mills to remember that she had promised to
call at his mother's for Mrs. Ansell; but now that they were on their
way thither he found himself wishing that the visit might have been
avoided. He was too proud of his mother to feel any doubt of the
impression she would produce; but what would Mrs. Westmore think of
their way of living, of the cheap jauntiness of the cottage, and the
smell of cooking penetrating all its thin partitions? Duplain, too,
would be coming in for dinner; and Amherst, in spite of his liking for
the young overseer, became conscious of a rather overbearing freedom in
his manner, the kind of misplaced ease which the new-made American
affects as the readiest sign of equality. All these trifles, usually
non-existent or supremely indifferent to Amherst, now assumed a sudden
importance, behind which he detected the uneasy desire that Mrs.
Westmore should not regard him as less of her own class than his
connections and his bringing-up entitled him to be thought. In a flash
he saw what he had forfeited by his choice of a calling--equal contact
with the little circle of people who gave life its crowning grace and
facility; and the next moment he was blushing at this reversal of his
standards, and wondering, almost contemptuously, what could be the
nature of the woman whose mere presence could produce such a change.

But there was no struggling against her influence; and as, the night
before, he had looked at Westmore with the nurse's eyes, so he now found
himself seeing his house as it must appear to Mrs. Westmore. He noticed
the shabby yellow paint of the palings, the neglected garden of their
neighbour, the week's wash flaunting itself indecently through the
denuded shrubs about the kitchen porch; and as he admitted his
companions to the narrow passage he was assailed by the expected whiff
of "boiled dinner," with which the steam of wash-tubs was intimately
mingled.

Duplain was in the passage; he had just come out of the kitchen, and the
fact that he had been washing his hands in the sink was made evident by
his rolled-back shirt-sleeves, and by the shiny redness of the knuckles
he was running through his stiff black hair.

"Hallo, John," he said, in his aggressive voice, which rose abruptly at
sight of Amherst's companions; and at the same moment the frowsy
maid-of-all-work, crimson from stooping over the kitchen stove, thrust
her head out to call after him: "See here, Mr. Duplain, don't you leave
your cravat laying round in my dough."




V

MRS. WESTMORE stayed just long enough not to break in too abruptly on
the flow of her friend's reminiscences, and to impress herself on Mrs.
Amherst's delighted eyes as an embodiment of tactfulness and
grace--looking sympathetically about the little room, which, with its
books, its casts, its photographs of memorable pictures, seemed, after
all, a not incongruous setting to her charms; so that when she rose to
go, saying, as her hand met Amherst's, "Tonight, then, you must tell me
all about those poor Dillons," he had the sense of having penetrated so
far into her intimacy that a new Westmore must inevitably result from
their next meeting.

"Say, John--the boss is a looker," Duplain commented across the
dinner-table, with the slangy grossness he sometimes affected; but
Amherst left it to his mother to look a quiet rebuke, feeling himself
too aloof from such contacts to resent them.

He had to rouse himself with an effort to take in the overseer's next
observation. "There was another lady at the office this morning,"
Duplain went on, while the two men lit their cigars in the porch.
"Asking after you--tried to get me to show her over the mills when I
said you were busy."

"Asking after me? What did she look like?"

"Well, her face was kinder white and small, with an awful lot of black
hair fitting close to it. Said she came from Hope Hospital."

Amherst looked up. "Did you show her over?" he asked with sudden
interest.

Duplain laughed slangily. "What? Me? And have Truscomb get on to it and
turn me down? How'd I know she wasn't a yellow reporter?"

Amherst uttered an impatient exclamation. "I wish to heaven a yellow
reporter _would_ go through these mills, and show them up in head-lines
a yard high!"

He regretted not having seen the nurse again: he felt sure she would
have been interested in the working of the mills, and quick to notice
the signs of discouragement and ill-health in the workers' faces; but a
moment later his regret was dispelled by the thought of his visit to
Mrs. Westmore. The afternoon hours dragged slowly by in the office,
where he was bound to his desk by Truscomb's continued absence; but at
length the evening whistle blew, the clerks in the outer room caught
their hats from the rack, Duplain presented himself with the day's
report, and the two men were free to walk home.

Two hours later Amherst was mounting Mrs. Westmore's steps; and his hand
was on the bell when the door opened and Dr. Disbrow came out. The
physician drew back, as if surprised and slightly disconcerted; but his
smile promptly effaced all signs of vexation, and he held his hand out
affably.

"A fine evening, Mr. Amherst. I'm glad to say I have been able to bring
Mrs. Westmore an excellent report of both patients--Mr. Truscomb, I
mean, and poor Dillon. This mild weather is all in their favour, and I
hope my brother-in-law will be about in a day or two." He passed on with
a nod.

Amherst was once more shown into the library where he had found Mrs.
Westmore that morning; but on this occasion it was Mr. Tredegar who rose
to meet him, and curtly waved him to a seat at a respectful distance
from his own. Amherst at once felt a change of atmosphere, and it was
easy to guess that the lowering of temperature was due to Dr. Disbrow's
recent visit. The thought roused the young man's combative instincts,
and caused him to say, as Mr. Tredegar continued to survey him in
silence from the depths of a capacious easy-chair: "I understood from
Mrs. Westmore that she wished to see me this evening."

It was the wrong note, and he knew it; but he had been unable to conceal
his sense of the vague current of opposition in the air.

"Quite so: I believe she asked you to come," Mr. Tredegar assented,
laying his hands together vertically, and surveying Amherst above the
acute angle formed by his parched finger-tips. As he leaned back,
small, dry, dictatorial, in the careless finish of his evening dress
and pearl-studded shirt-front, his appearance put the finishing touch to
Amherst's irritation. He felt the incongruousness of his rough clothes
in this atmosphere of after-dinner ease, the mud on his walking-boots,
the clinging cotton-dust which seemed to have entered into the very
pores of the skin; and again his annoyance escaped in his voice.

"Perhaps I have come too early--" he began; but Mr. Tredegar interposed
with glacial amenity: "No, I believe you are exactly on time; but Mrs.
Westmore is unexpectedly detained. The fact is, Mr. and Mrs. Halford
Gaines are dining with her, and she has delegated to me the duty of
hearing what you have to say."

Amherst hesitated. His impulse was to exclaim: "There is no duty about
it!" but a moment's thought showed the folly of thus throwing up the
game. With the prospect of Truscomb's being about again in a day or two,
it might well be that this was his last chance of reaching Mrs.
Westmore's ear; and he was bound to put his case while he could,
irrespective of personal feeling. But his disappointment was too keen to
be denied, and after a pause he said: "Could I not speak with Mrs.
Westmore later?"

Mr. Tredegar's cool survey deepened to a frown. The young man's
importunity was really out of proportion to what he signified. "Mrs.
Westmore has asked me to replace her," he said, putting his previous
statement more concisely.

"Then I am not to see her at all?" Amherst exclaimed; and the lawyer
replied indifferently: "I am afraid not, as she leaves tomorrow."

Mr. Tredegar was in his element when refusing a favour. Not that he was
by nature unkind; he was, indeed, capable of a cold beneficence; but to
deny what it was in his power to accord was the readiest way of
proclaiming his authority, that power of loosing and binding which made
him regard himself as almost consecrated to his office.

Having sacrificed to this principle, he felt free to add as a gratuitous
concession to politeness: "You are perhaps not aware that I am Mrs.
Westmore's lawyer, and one of the executors under her husband's will."

He dropped this negligently, as though conscious of the absurdity of
presenting his credentials to a subordinate; but his manner no longer
incensed Amherst: it merely strengthened his resolve to sink all sense
of affront in the supreme effort of obtaining a hearing.

"With that stuffed canary to advise her," he reflected, "there's no hope
for her unless I can assert myself now"; and the unconscious wording of
his thought expressed his inward sense that Bessy Westmore stood in
greater need of help than her work-people.

Still he hesitated, hardly knowing how to begin. To Mr. Tredegar he was
no more than an underling, without authority to speak in his superior's
absence; and the lack of an official warrant, which he could have
disregarded in appealing to Mrs. Westmore, made it hard for him to find
a good opening in addressing her representative. He saw, too, from Mr.
Tredegar's protracted silence, that the latter counted on the effect of
this embarrassment, and was resolved not to minimize it by giving him a
lead; and this had the effect of increasing his caution.

He looked up and met the lawyer's eye. "Mrs. Westmore," he began, "asked
me to let her know something about the condition of the people at the
mills----"

Mr. Tredegar raised his hand. "Excuse me," he said. "I understood from
Mrs. Westmore that it was you who asked her permission to call this
evening and set forth certain grievances on the part of the operatives."

Amherst reddened. "I did ask her--yes. But I don't in any sense
represent the operatives. I simply wanted to say a word for them."

Mr. Tredegar folded his hands again, and crossed one lean little leg
over the other, bringing into his line of vision the glossy tip of a
patent-leather pump, which he studied for a moment in silence.

"Does Mr. Truscomb know of your intention?" he then enquired.

"No, sir," Amherst answered energetically, glad that he had forced the
lawyer out of his passive tactics. "I am here on my own
responsibility--and in direct opposition to my own interests," he
continued with a slight smile. "I know that my proceeding is quite out
of order, and that I have, personally, everything to lose by it, and in
a larger way probably very little to gain; but I thought Mrs. Westmore's
attention ought to be called to certain conditions at the mills, and no
one else seemed likely to speak of them."

"May I ask why you assume that Mr. Truscomb will not do so when he has
the opportunity?"

Amherst could not repress a smile. "Because it is owing to Mr. Truscomb
that they exist."

"The real object of your visit then," said Mr. Tredegar, speaking with
deliberation, "is--er--an underhand attack on your manager's methods?"

Amherst's face darkened, but he kept his temper. "I see nothing
especially underhand in my course----"

"Except," the other interposed ironically, "that you have waited to
speak till Mr. Truscomb was not in a position to defend himself."

"I never had the chance before. It was at Mrs. Westmore's own suggestion
that I took her over the mills, and feeling as I do I should have
thought it cowardly to shirk the chance of pointing out to her the
conditions there."

Mr. Tredegar mused, his eyes still bent on his gently-oscillating foot.
Whenever a sufficient pressure from without parted the fog of
self-complacency in which he moved, he had a shrewd enough outlook on
men and motives; and it may be that the vigorous ring of Amherst's
answer had effected this momentary clearing of the air.

At any rate, his next words were spoken in a more accessible tone. "To
what conditions do you refer?"

"To the conditions under which the mill-hands work and live--to the
whole management of the mills, in fact, in relation to the people
employed."

"That is a large question. Pardon my possible ignorance--" Mr. Tredegar
paused to make sure that his hearer took in the full irony of this--"but
surely in this state there are liability and inspection laws for the
protection of the operatives?"

"There are such laws, yes--but most of them are either a dead letter, or
else so easily evaded that no employer thinks of conforming to them."

"No employer? Then your specific charge against the Westmore mills is
part of a general arraignment of all employers of labour?"

"By no means, sir. I only meant that, where the hands are well treated,
it is due rather to the personal good-will of the employer than to any
fear of the law."

"And in what respect do you think the Westmore hands unfairly treated?"

Amherst paused to measure his words. "The question, as you say, is a
large one," he rejoined. "It has its roots in the way the business is
organized--in the traditional attitude of the company toward the
operatives. I hoped that Mrs. Westmore might return to the mills--might
visit some of the people in their houses. Seeing their way of living, it
might have occurred to her to ask a reason for it--and one enquiry would
have led to another. She spoke this morning of going to the hospital to
see Dillon."

"She did go to the hospital: I went with her. But as Dillon was
sleeping, and as the matron told us he was much better--a piece of news
which, I am happy to say, Dr. Disbrow has just confirmed--she did not go
up to the ward."

Amherst was silent, and Mr. Tredegar pursued: "I gather, from your
bringing up Dillon's case, that for some reason you consider it typical
of the defects you find in Mr. Truscomb's management. Suppose,
therefore, we drop generalizations, and confine ourselves to the
particular instance. What wrong, in your view, has been done the
Dillons?"

He turned, as he spoke, to extract a cigar from the box at his elbow.
"Let me offer you one, Mr. Amherst: we shall talk more comfortably," he
suggested with distant affability; but Amherst, with a gesture of
refusal, plunged into his exposition of the Dillon case. He tried to put
the facts succinctly, presenting them in their bare ugliness, without
emotional drapery; setting forth Dillon's good record for sobriety and
skill, dwelling on the fact that his wife's ill-health was the result of
perfectly remediable conditions in the work-rooms, and giving his
reasons for the belief that the accident had been caused, not by
Dillon's carelessness, but by the over-crowding of the carding-room. Mr.
Tredegar listened attentively, though the cloud of cigar-smoke between
himself and Amherst masked from the latter his possible changes of
expression. When he removed his cigar, his face looked smaller than
ever, as though desiccated by the fumes of the tobacco.

"Have you ever called Mr. Gaines's attention to these matters?"

"No: that would have been useless. He has always refused to discuss the
condition of the mills with any one but the manager."

"H'm--that would seem to prove that Mr. Gaines, who lives here, sees as
much reason for trusting Truscomb's judgment as Mr. Westmore, who
delegated his authority from a distance."

Amherst did not take this up, and after a pause Mr. Tredegar went on:
"You know, of course, the answers I might make to such an indictment. As
a lawyer, I might call your attention to the employé's waiver of risk,
to the strong chances of contributory negligence, and so on; but happily
in this case such arguments are superfluous. You are apparently not
aware that Dillon's injury is much slighter than it ought to be to serve
your purpose. Dr. Disbrow has just told us that he will probably get off
with the loss of a finger; and I need hardly say that, whatever may have
been Dillon's own share in causing the accident--and as to this, as you
admit, opinions differ--Mrs. Westmore will assume all the expenses of
his nursing, besides making a liberal gift to his wife." Mr. Tredegar
laid down his cigar and drew forth a silver-mounted note-case. "Here, in
fact," he continued, "is a cheque which she asks you to transmit, and
which, as I think you will agree, ought to silence, on your part as well
as Mrs. Dillon's, any criticism of Mrs. Westmore's dealings with her
operatives."

The blood rose to Amherst's forehead, and he just restrained himself
from pushing back the cheque which Mr. Tredegar had laid on the table
between them.

"There is no question of criticizing Mrs. Westmore's dealings with her
operatives--as far as I know, she has had none as yet," he rejoined,
unable to control his voice as completely as his hand. "And the proof
of it is the impunity with which her agents deceive her--in this case,
for instance, of Dillon's injury. Dr. Disbrow, who is Mr. Truscomb's
brother-in-law, and apt to be influenced by his views, assures you that
the man will get off with the loss of a finger; but some one equally
competent to speak told me last night that he would lose not only his
hand but his arm."

Amherst's voice had swelled to a deep note of anger, and with his tossed
hair, and eyes darkening under furrowed brows, he presented an image of
revolutionary violence which deepened the disdain on Mr. Tredegar's lip.

"Some one equally competent to speak? Are you prepared to name this
anonymous authority?"

Amherst hesitated. "No--I shall have to ask you to take my word for it,"
he returned with a shade of embarrassment.

"Ah--" Mr. Tredegar murmured, giving to the expressive syllable its
utmost measure of decent exultation.

Amherst quivered under the thin lash, and broke out: "It is all you have
required of Dr. Disbrow--" but at this point Mr. Tredegar rose to his
feet.

"My dear sir, your resorting to such arguments convinces me that nothing
is to be gained by prolonging our talk. I will not even take up your
insinuations against two of the most respected men in the
community--such charges reflect only on those who make them."

Amherst, whose flame of anger had subsided with the sudden sense of its
futility, received this in silence, and the lawyer, reassured, continued
with a touch of condescension: "My only specific charge from Mrs.
Westmore was to hand you this cheque; but, in spite of what has passed,
I take it upon myself to add, in her behalf, that your conduct of today
will not be allowed to weigh against your record at the mills, and that
the extraordinary charges you have seen fit to bring against your
superiors will--if not repeated--simply be ignored."

       *       *       *       *       *

When, the next morning at about ten, Mrs. Eustace Ansell joined herself
to the two gentlemen who still lingered over a desultory breakfast in
Mrs. Westmore's dining-room, she responded to their greeting with less
than her usual vivacity.

[Illustration: "No--I shall have to ask you to take my word for it."]

It was one of Mrs. Ansell's arts to bring to the breakfast-table just
the right shade of sprightliness, a warmth subdued by discretion as the
early sunlight is tempered by the lingering coolness of night. She was,
in short, as fresh, as temperate, as the hour, yet without the
concomitant chill which too often marks its human atmosphere: rather her
soft effulgence dissipated the morning frosts, opening pinched spirits
to a promise of midday warmth. But on this occasion a mist of
uncertainty hung on her smile, and veiled the glance which she turned
on the contents of the heavy silver dishes successively presented to her
notice. When, at the conclusion of this ceremony, the servants had
withdrawn, she continued for a moment to stir her tea in silence, while
her glance travelled from Mr. Tredegar, sunk in his morning mail, to Mr.
Langhope, who leaned back resignedly in his chair, trying to solace
himself with Hanaford Banner, till midday should bring him a sight of
the metropolitan press.

"I suppose you know," she said suddenly, "that Bessy has telegraphed for
Cicely, and made her arrangements to stay here another week."

Mr. Langhope's stick slipped to the floor with the sudden displacement
of his whole lounging person, and Mr. Tredegar, removing his
tortoise-shell reading-glasses, put them hastily into their case, as
though to declare for instant departure.

"My dear Maria--" Mr. Langhope gasped, while she rose and restored his
stick.

"She considers it, then, her duty to wait and see Truscomb?" the lawyer
asked; and Mrs. Ansell, regaining her seat, murmured discreetly: "She
puts it so--yes."

"My dear Maria--" Mr. Langhope repeated helplessly, tossing aside his
paper and drawing his chair up to the table.

"But it would be perfectly easy to return: it is quite unnecessary to
wait here for his recovery," Mr. Tredegar pursued, as though setting
forth a fact which had not hitherto presented itself to the more limited
intelligence of his hearers.

Mr. Langhope emitted a short laugh, and Mrs. Ansell answered gently:
"She says she detests the long journey."

Mr. Tredegar rose and gathered up his letters with a gesture of
annoyance. "In that case--if I had been notified earlier of this
decision, I might have caught the morning train," he interrupted
himself, glancing resentfully at his watch.

"Oh, don't leave us, Tredegar," Mr. Langhope entreated. "We'll reason
with her--we'll persuade her to go back by the three-forty."

Mrs. Ansell smiled. "She telegraphed at seven. Cicely and the governess
are already on their way."

"At seven? But, my dear friend, why on earth didn't you tell us?"

"I didn't know till a few minutes ago. Bessy called me in as I was
coming down."

"Ah--" Mr. Langhope murmured, meeting her eyes for a fraction of a
second. In the encounter, she appeared to communicate something more
than she had spoken, for as he stooped to pick up his paper he said,
more easily: "My dear Tredegar, if we're in a box there's no reason why
we should force you into it too. Ring for Ropes, and we'll look up a
train for you."

Mr. Tredegar appeared slightly ruffled at this prompt acquiescence in
his threatened departure. "Of course, if I had been notified in advance,
I might have arranged to postpone my engagements another day; but in any
case, it is quite out of the question that I should return in a
week--and quite unnecessary," he added, snapping his lips shut as though
he were closing his last portmanteau.

"Oh, quite--quite," Mr. Langhope assented. "It isn't, in fact, in the
least necessary for any of us either to stay on now or to return.
Truscomb could come to Long Island when he recovers, and answer any
questions we may have to put; but if Bessy has sent for the child, we
must of course put off going for today--at least I must," he added
sighing, "and, though I know it's out of the question to exact such a
sacrifice from you, I have a faint hope that our delightful friend here,
with the altruistic spirit of her sex----"

"Oh, I shall enjoy it--my maid is unpacking," Mrs. Ansell gaily
affirmed; and Mr. Tredegar, shrugging his shoulders, said curtly: "In
that case I will ring for the time-table."

When he had withdrawn to consult it in the seclusion of the library, and
Mrs. Ansell, affecting a sudden desire for a second cup of tea, had
reseated herself to await the replenishment of the kettle, Mr. Langhope
exchanged his own chair for a place at her side.

"Now what on earth does this mean?" he asked, lighting a cigarette in
response to her slight nod of consent.

Mrs. Ansell's gaze lost itself in the depths of the empty tea-pot.

"A number of things--or any one of them," she said at length, extending
her arm toward the tea-caddy.

"For instance--?" he rejoined, following appreciatively the movements of
her long slim hands.

She raised her head and met his eyes. "For instance: it may mean--don't
resent the suggestion--that you and Mr. Tredegar were not quite
well-advised in persuading her not to see Mr. Amherst yesterday
evening."

Mr. Langhope uttered an exclamation of surprise.

"But, my dear Maria--in the name of reason...why, after the doctor's
visit--after his coming here last night, at Truscomb's request, to put
the actual facts before her--should she have gone over the whole
business again with this interfering young fellow? How, in fact, could
she have done so," he added, after vainly waiting for her reply,
"without putting a sort of slight on Truscomb, who is, after all, the
only person entitled to speak with authority?"

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 as prompt a
reaction of indifference. Luckily Mrs. Westmore's course had served as a
corrective for his lack of experience; she had even, as it appeared,
been at some pains to hasten the process of disillusionment. This timely
discipline left him blushing at his own insincerity; for he now saw that
he had risked his future not because of his zeal for the welfare of the
mill-hands, but because Mrs. Westmore's look was like sunshine on his
frozen senses, and because he was resolved, at any cost, to arrest her
attention, to associate himself with her by the only means in his power.

Well, he deserved to fail with such an end in view; and the futility of
his scheme was matched by the vanity of his purpose. In the cold light
of disenchantment it seemed as though he had tried to build an
impregnable fortress out of nursery blocks. How could he have foreseen
anything but failure for so preposterous an attempt? His breach of
discipline would of course be reported at once to Mr. Gaines and
Truscomb; and the manager, already jealous of his assistant's popularity
with the hands, which was a tacit criticism of his own methods, would
promptly seize the pretext to be rid of him. Amherst was aware that only
his technical efficiency, and his knack of getting the maximum of work
out of the operatives, had secured him from Truscomb's animosity. From
the outset there had been small sympathy between the two; but the
scarcity of competent and hard-working assistants had made Truscomb
endure him for what he was worth to the mills. Now, however, his own
folly had put the match to the manager's smouldering dislike, and he saw
himself, in consequence, discharged and black-listed, and perhaps
roaming for months in quest of a job. He knew the efficiency of that
far-reaching system of defamation whereby the employers of labour pursue
and punish the subordinate who incurs their displeasure. In the case of
a mere operative this secret persecution often worked complete ruin; and
even to a man of Amherst's worth it opened the dispiriting prospect of a
long struggle for rehabilitation.

Deep down, he suffered most at the thought that his blow for the
operatives had failed; but on the surface it was the manner of his
failure that exasperated him. For it seemed to prove him unfit for the
very work to which he was drawn: that yearning to help the world forward
that, in some natures, sets the measure to which the personal adventure
must keep step. Amherst had hitherto felt himself secured by his insight
and self-control from the emotional errors besetting the way of the
enthusiast; and behold, he had stumbled into the first sentimental trap
in his path, and tricked his eyes with a Christmas-chromo vision of
lovely woman dispensing coals and blankets! Luckily, though such wounds
to his self-confidence cut deep, he could apply to them the antiseptic
of an unfailing humour; and before he had finished dressing, the
picture of his wide schemes of social reform contracting to a blue-eyed
philanthropy of cheques and groceries, had provoked a reaction of
laughter. Perhaps the laughter came too soon, and rang too loud, to be
true to the core; but at any rate it healed the edges of his hurt, and
gave him a sound surface of composure.

But he could not laugh away the thought of the trials to which his
intemperance had probably exposed his mother; and when, at the
breakfast-table, from which Duplain had already departed, she broke into
praise of their visitor, it was like a burning irritant on his wound.

"What a face, John! Of course I don't often see people of that kind
now--" the words, falling from her too simply to be reproachful, wrung
him, for that, all the more--"but I'm sure that kind of soft loveliness
is rare everywhere; like a sweet summer morning with the mist on it. The
Gaines girls, now, are my idea of the modern type; very handsome, of
course, but you see just _how_ handsome the first minute. I like a story
that keeps one wondering till the end. It was very kind of Maria
Ansell," Mrs. Amherst wandered happily on, "to come and hunt me out
yesterday, and I enjoyed our quiet talk about old times. But what I
liked best was seeing Mrs. Westmore--and, oh, John, if she came to live
here, what a benediction to the mills!"

Amherst was silent, moved most of all by the unimpaired simplicity of
heart with which his mother could take up past relations, and open her
meagre life to the high visitations of grace and fashion, without a
tinge of self-consciousness or apology. "I shall never be as genuine as
that," he thought, remembering how he had wished to have Mrs. Westmore
know that he was of her own class. How mixed our passions are, and how
elastic must be the word that would cover any one of them! Amherst's, at
that moment, were all stained with the deep wound to his self-love.

The discolouration he carried in his eye made the mill-village seem more
than commonly cheerless and ugly as he walked over to the office after
breakfast. Beyond the grim roof-line of the factories a dazzle of rays
sent upward from banked white clouds the promise of another brilliant
day; and he reflected that Mrs. Westmore would soon be speeding home to
the joy of a gallop over the plains.

Far different was the task that awaited him--yet it gave him a pang to
think that he might be performing it for the last time. In spite of Mr.
Tredegar's assurances, he was certain that the report of his conduct
must by this time have reached the President, and been transmitted to
Truscomb; the latter was better that morning, and the next day he would
doubtless call his rebellious assistant to account. Amherst, meanwhile,
took up his routine with a dull heart. Even should his offense be
condoned, his occupation presented, in itself, little future to a man
without money or powerful connections. Money! He had spurned the thought
of it in choosing his work, yet he now saw that, without its aid, he was
powerless to accomplish the object to which his personal desires had
been sacrificed. His love of his craft had gradually been merged in the
larger love for his fellow-workers, and in the resulting desire to lift
and widen their lot. He had once fancied that this end might be attained
by an internal revolution in the management of the Westmore mills; that
he might succeed in creating an industrial object-lesson conspicuous
enough to point the way to wiser law-making and juster relations between
the classes. But the last hours' experiences had shown him how vain it
was to assault single-handed the strong barrier between money and
labour, and how his own dash at the breach had only thrust him farther
back into the obscure ranks of the stragglers. It was, after all, only
through politics that he could return successfully to the attack; and
financial independence was the needful preliminary to a political
career. If he had stuck to the law he might, by this time, have been
nearer his goal; but then the gold might not have mattered, since it was
only by living among the workers that he had learned to care for their
fate. And rather than have forfeited that poignant yet mighty vision of
the onward groping of the mass, rather than have missed the widening of
his own nature that had come through sharing their hopes and pains, he
would still have turned from the easier way, have chosen the deeper
initiation rather than the readier attainment.

But this philosophic view of the situation was a mere thread of light on
the farthest verge of his sky: much nearer were the clouds of immediate
care, amid which his own folly, and his mother's possible suffering from
it, loomed darkest; and these considerations made him resolve that, if
his insubordination were overlooked, he would swallow the affront of a
pardon, and continue for the present in the mechanical performance of
his duties. He had just brought himself to this leaden state of
acquiescence when one of the clerks in the outer office thrust his head
in to say: "A lady asking for you--" and looking up, Amherst beheld
Bessy Westmore.

She came in alone, with an air of high self-possession in marked
contrast to her timidity and indecision of the previous day. Amherst
thought she looked taller, more majestic; so readily may the upward
slant of a soft chin, the firmer line of yielding brows, add a cubit to
the outward woman. Her aspect was so commanding that he fancied she had
come to express her disapproval of his conduct, to rebuke him for lack
of respect to Mr. Tredegar; but a moment later it became clear, even to
his inexperienced perceptions, that it was not to himself that her
challenge was directed.

She advanced toward the seat he had moved forward, but in her absorption
forgot to seat herself, and stood with her clasped hands resting on the
back of the chair.

"I have come back to talk to you," she began, in her sweet voice with
its occasional quick lift of appeal. "I knew that, in Mr. Truscomb's
absence, it would be hard for you to leave the mills, and there are one
or two things I want you to explain before I go away--some of the
things, for instance, that you spoke to Mr. Tredegar about last night."

Amherst's feeling of constraint returned. "I'm afraid I expressed myself
badly; I may have annoyed him--" he began.

She smiled this away, as though irrelevant to the main issue. "Perhaps
you don't quite understand each other--but I am sure you can make it
clear to me." She sank into the chair, resting one arm on the edge of
the desk behind which he had resumed his place. "That is the reason why
I came alone," she continued. "I never can understand when a lot of
people are trying to tell me a thing all at once. And I don't suppose I
care as much as a man would--a lawyer especially--about the forms that
ought to be observed. All I want is to find out what is wrong and how to
remedy it."

Her blue eyes met Amherst's in a look that flowed like warmth about his
heart. How should he have doubted that her feelings were as exquisite as
her means of expressing them? The iron bands of distrust were loosened
from his spirit, and he blushed for his cheap scepticism of the morning.
In a woman so evidently nurtured in dependence, whose views had been
formed, and her actions directed, by the most conventional influences,
the mere fact of coming alone to Westmore, in open defiance of her
advisers, bespoke a persistence of purpose that put his doubts to shame.

"It will make a great difference to the people here if you interest
yourself in them," he rejoined. "I tried to explain to Mr. Tredegar that
I had no wish to criticise the business management of the mills--even if
there had been any excuse for my doing so--but that I was sure the
condition of the operatives could be very much improved, without
permanent harm to the business, by any one who felt a personal sympathy
for them; and in the end I believe such sympathy produces better work,
and so benefits the employer materially."

She listened with her gentle look of trust, as though committing to him,
with the good faith of a child, her ignorance, her credulity, her littl