Part 33 (1/2)

”Nor tomorrow,” Amherst said in a low voice. There was another pause before he added: ”It may be some time before--” He broke off, and then continued with an effort: ”The fact is, I am thinking of going back to my old work.”

She caught him up with an exclamation of surprise and sympathy. ”Your old work? You mean at----”

She was checked by the quick contraction of pain in his face. ”Not that!

I mean that I'm thinking of taking a new job--as manager of a Georgia mill.... It's the only thing I know how to do, and I've got to do something--” He forced a laugh. ”The habit of work is incurable!”

Justine's face had grown as grave as his. She hesitated a moment, looking down the street toward the angle of Madison Square, which was visible from the corner where they stood.

”Will you walk back to the square with me? Then we can sit down a moment.”

She began to move as she spoke, and he walked beside her in silence till they had gained the seat she pointed out. Her hansom trailed after them, drawing up at the corner.

As Amherst sat down beside her, Justine turned to him with an air of quiet resolution. ”Mr. Amherst--will you let me ask you something? Is this a sudden decision?”

”Yes. I decided yesterday.”

”And Bessy----?”

His glance dropped for the first time, but Justine pressed her point.

”Bessy approves?”

”She--she will, I think--when she knows----”

”When she knows?” Her emotion sprang into her face. ”When she knows?

Then she does not--yet?”

”No. The offer came suddenly. I must go at once.”

”Without seeing her?” She cut him short with a quick commanding gesture.

”Mr. Amherst, you can't do this--you won't do it! You will not go away without seeing Bessy!” she said.

Her eyes sought his and drew them upward, constraining them to meet the full beam of her rebuking gaze.

”I must do what seems best under the circ.u.mstances,” he answered hesitatingly. ”She will hear from me, of course; I shall write today--and later----”

”Not later! _Now_--you will go back now to Lynbrook! Such things can't be told in writing--if they must be said at all, they must be spoken.

Don't tell me that I don't understand--or that I'm meddling in what doesn't concern me. I don't care a fig for that! I've always meddled in what didn't concern me--I always shall, I suppose, till I die! And I understand enough to know that Bessy is very unhappy--and that you're the wiser and stronger of the two. I know what it's been to you to give up your work--to feel yourself useless,” she interrupted herself, with softening eyes, ”and I know how you've tried...I've watched you...but Bessy has tried too; and even if you've both failed--if you've come to the end of your resources--it's for you to face the fact, and help her face it--not to run away from it like this!”

Amherst sat silent under the a.s.sault of her eloquence. He was conscious of no instinctive resentment, no sense that she was, as she confessed, meddling in matters which did not concern her. His ebbing spirit was revived by the shock of an ardour like his own. She had not shrunk from calling him a coward--and it did him good to hear her call him so! Her words put life back into its true perspective, restored their meaning to obsolete terms: to truth and manliness and courage. He had lived so long among equivocations that he had forgotten how to look a fact in the face; but here was a woman who judged life by his own standards--and by those standards she had found him wanting!

Still, he could not forget the last bitter hours, or change his opinion as to the futility of attempting to remain at Lynbrook. He felt as strongly as ever the need of moral and mental liberation--the right to begin life again on his own terms. But Justine Brent had made him see that his first step toward self-a.s.sertion had been the inconsistent one of trying to evade its results.

”You are right--I will go back,” he said.

She thanked him with her eyes, as she had thanked him on the terrace at Lynbrook, on the autumn evening which had witnessed their first broken exchange of confidences; and he was struck once more with the change that feeling produced in her. Emotions flashed across her face like the sweep of sun-rent clouds over a quiet landscape, bringing out the gleam of hidden waters, the fervour of smouldering colours, all the subtle delicacies of modelling that are lost under the light of an open sky.

And it was extraordinary how she could infuse into a principle the warmth and colour of a pa.s.sion! If conduct, to most people, seemed a cold matter of social prudence or inherited habit, to her it was always the newly-discovered question of her own relation to life--as most women see the great issues only through their own wants and prejudices, so she seemed always to see her personal desires in the light of the larger claims.