Part 38 (1/2)

She sprang up, brus.h.i.+ng the curls from her temples with a petulant gesture. ”Don't mind me if I'm cross--but I've had a dose of preaching from Maria Ansell, and I don't know why my friends should treat me like a puppet without any preferences of my own, and press me upon a man who has done his best to show that he doesn't want me. As a matter of fact, he and I are luckily agreed on that point too--and I'm afraid all the good advice in the world won't persuade us to change our opinion!”

Justine held her ground. ”If I believed that of either of you, I shouldn't have written--I should not be pleading with you now--And Mr.

Amherst doesn't believe it either,” she added, after a pause, conscious of the risk she was taking, but thinking the words might act like a blow in the face of a person sinking under a deadly narcotic.

Bessy's smile deepened to a sneer. ”I see you've talked me over thoroughly--and on _his_ views I ought perhaps not to have risked an opinion----”

”We have not talked you over,” Justine exclaimed. ”Mr. Amherst could never talk of you...in the way you think....” And under the light staccato of Bessy's laugh she found resolution to add: ”It is not in that way that I know what he feels.”

”Ah? I should be curious to hear, then----”

Justine turned to the letter, which still lay between them. ”Will you read the last sentence again? The postscript, I mean.”

Bessy, after a surprised glance at her, took the letter up with the deprecating murmur of one who acts under compulsion rather than dispute about a trifle.

”The postscript? Let me see...'Don't let my wife ride Impulse.'--_Et puis?_” she murmured, dropping the page again.

”Well, does it tell you nothing? It's a cold letter--at first I thought so--the letter of a man who believes himself deeply hurt--so deeply that he will make no advance, no sign of relenting. That's what I thought when I first read it...but the postscript undoes it all.”

Justine, as she spoke, had drawn near Bessy, laying a hand on her arm, and shedding on her the radiance of a face all charity and sweet compa.s.sion. It was her rare gift, at such moments, to forget her own relation to the person for whose fate she was concerned, to cast aside all consciousness of criticism and distrust in the heart she strove to reach, as pitiful people forget their physical timidity in the attempt to help a wounded animal.

For a moment Bessy seemed to waver. The colour flickered faintly up her cheek, her long lashes drooped--she had the tenderest lids!--and all her face seemed melting under the beams of Justine's ardour. But the letter was still in her hand--her eyes, in sinking, fell upon it, and she sounded beneath her breath the fatal phrase: ”'I have done this solely because you asked it.'

”After such a tribute to your influence I don't wonder you feel competent to set everybody's affairs in order! But take my advice, my dear--_don't_ ask me not to ride Impulse!”

The pity froze on Justine's lip: she shrank back cut to the quick. For a moment the silence between the two women rang with the flight of arrowy, wounding thoughts; then Bessy's anger flagged, she gave one of her embarra.s.sed half-laughs, and turning back, laid a deprecating touch on her friend's arm.

”I didn't mean that, Justine...but let us not talk now--I can't!”

Justine did not move: the reaction could not come as quickly in her case. But she turned on Bessy two eyes full of pardon, full of speechless pity...and Bessy received the look silently before she moved to the door and went out.

”Oh, poor thing--poor thing!” Justine gasped as the door closed.

She had already forgotten her own hurt--she was alone again with Bessy's sterile pain. She stood staring before her for a moment--then her eyes fell on Amherst's letter, which had fluttered to the floor between them.

The fatal letter! If it had not come at that unlucky moment perhaps she might still have gained her end.... She picked it up and re-read it.

Yes--there were phrases in it that a wounded suspicious heart might misconstrue.... Yet Bessy's last words had absolved her.... Why had she not answered them? Why had she stood there dumb? The blow to her pride had been too deep, had been dealt too unexpectedly--for one miserable moment she had thought first of herself! Ah, that importunate, irrepressible self--the _moi ha.s.sable_ of the Christian--if only one could tear it from one's breast! She had missed an opportunity--her last opportunity perhaps! By this time, even, a hundred hostile influences, cold whispers of vanity, of selfishness, of worldly pride, might have drawn their freezing ring about Bessy's heart....

Justine started up to follow her...then paused, recalling her last words. ”Let us not talk now--I can't!” She had no right to intrude on that bleeding privacy--if the chance had been hers she had lost it. She dropped back into her seat at the desk, hiding her face in her hands.

Presently she heard the clock strike, and true to her tireless instinct of activity, she lifted her head, took up her pen, and went on with the correspondence she had dropped.... It was hard at first to collect her thoughts, or even to summon to her pen the conventional phrases that sufficed for most of the notes. Groping for a word, she pushed aside her writing and stared out at the sallow frozen landscape framed by the window at which she sat. The sleet had ceased, and hollows of sunless blue showed through the driving wind-clouds. A hard sky and a hard ground--frost-bound ringing earth under rigid ice-mailed trees.

As Justine looked out, s.h.i.+vering a little, she saw a woman's figure riding down the avenue toward the gate. The figure disappeared behind a clump of evergreens--showed again farther down, through the boughs of a skeleton beech--and revealed itself in the next open s.p.a.ce as Bessy--Bessy in the saddle on a day of glaring frost, when no horse could keep his footing out of a walk!

Justine went to the window and strained her eyes for a confirming glimpse. Yes--it was Bessy! There was no mistaking that light flexible figure, every line swaying true to the beat of the horse's stride. But Justine remembered that Bessy had not meant to ride--had countermanded her horse because of the bad going.... Well, she was a perfect horsewoman and had no doubt chosen her surest-footed mount...probably the brown cob, Tony Lumpkin.

But when did Tony's sides s.h.i.+ne so bright through the leafless branches?