Part 46 (1/2)
While she smote him with one hand, she sued for pardon with the other; and the contradiction was so characteristic, it explained and excused in so touching a way the inconsistencies of her impulsive heart and hesitating mind, that he was filled with that tender compunction, that searching sense of his own shortcomings, which generous natures feel when they find they have underrated the generosity of others. But Amherst's was not an introspective mind, and his sound moral sense told him, when the first pang of self-reproach had subsided, that he had done his best by his wife, and was in no way to blame if her recognition of the fact had come too late. The self-reproach subsided; and, instead of the bitterness of the past, it left a softened memory which made him take up his task with the sense that he was now working with Bessy and not against her.
Yet perhaps, after all, it was chiefly the work itself which had healed old wounds, and quelled the tendency to vain regrets. Amherst was only thirty-four; and in the prime of his energies the task he was made for had been given back to him. To a sound nature, which finds its outlet in fruitful action, nothing so simplifies the complexities of life, so tends to a large acceptance of its vicissitudes and mysteries, as the sense of doing something each day toward clearing one's own bit of the wilderness. And this was the joy at last conceded to Amherst. The mills were virtually his; and the fact that he ruled them not only in his own right but as Cicely's representative, made him doubly eager to justify his wife's trust in him.
Mrs. Amherst, looking up from a telegram which the parlour-maid had handed her, smiled across the table at her son.
”From Maria Ansell--they are all coming tomorrow.”
”Ah--that's good,” Amherst rejoined. ”I should have been sorry if Cicely had not been here.”
”Mr. Langhope is coming too,” his mother continued. ”I'm glad of that, John.”
”Yes,” Amherst again a.s.sented.
The morrow was to be a great day at Westmore. The Emergency Hospital, planned in the first months of his marriage, and abandoned in the general reduction of expenditure at the mills, had now been completed on a larger and more elaborate scale, as a memorial to Bessy. The strict retrenchment of all personal expenses, and the leasing of Lynbrook and the town house, had enabled Amherst, in eighteen months, to lay by enough income to carry out this plan, which he was impatient to see executed as a visible commemoration of his wife's generosity to Westmore. For Amherst persisted in regarding the gift of her fortune as a gift not to himself but to the mills: he looked on himself merely as the agent of her beneficent intentions. He was anxious that Westmore and Hanaford should take the same view; and the opening of the Westmore Memorial Hospital was therefore to be performed with an unwonted degree of ceremony.
”I am glad Mr. Langhope is coming,” Mrs. Amherst repeated, as they rose from the table. ”It shows, dear--doesn't it?--that he's really gratified--that he appreciates your motive....”
She raised a proud glance to her tall son, whose head seemed to tower higher than ever above her small proportions. Renewed self-confidence, and the habit of command, had in fact restored the erectness to Amherst's shoulders and the clearness to his eyes. The cleft between the brows was gone, and his veiled inward gaze had given place to a glance almost as outward-looking and unspeculative as his mother's.
”It shows--well, yes--what you say!” he rejoined with a slight laugh, and a tap on her shoulder as she pa.s.sed.
He was under no illusions as to his father-in-law's att.i.tude: he knew that Mr. Langhope would willingly have broken the will which deprived his grand-daughter of half her inheritance, and that his subsequent show of friendliness was merely a concession to expediency. But in his present mood Amherst almost believed that time and closer relations might turn such sentiments into honest liking. He was very fond of his little step-daughter, and deeply sensible of his obligations toward her; and he hoped that, as Mr. Langhope came to recognize this, it might bring about a better understanding between them.
His mother detained him. ”You're going back to the mills at once? I wanted to consult you about the rooms. Miss Brent had better be next to Cicely?”
”I suppose so--yes. I'll see you before I go.” He nodded affectionately and pa.s.sed on, his hands full of papers, into the Oriental smoking-room, now dedicated to the unexpected uses of an office and study.
Mrs. Amherst, as she turned away, found the parlour-maid in the act of opening the front door to the highly-tinted and well-dressed figure of Mrs. Harry Dressel.
”I'm so delighted to hear that you're expecting Justine,” began Mrs.
Dressel as the two ladies pa.s.sed into the drawing-room.
”Ah, you've heard too?” Mrs. Amherst rejoined, enthroning her visitor in one of the monumental plush armchairs beneath the threatening weight of the Bay of Naples.
”I hadn't till this moment; in fact I flew in to ask for news, and on the door-step there was such a striking-looking young man enquiring for her, and I heard the parlour-maid say she was arriving tomorrow.”
”A young man? Some one you didn't know?” Striking apparitions of the male s.e.x were of infrequent occurrence at Hanaford, and Mrs. Amherst's unabated interest in the movement of life caused her to dwell on this statement.
”Oh, no--I'm sure he was a stranger. Extremely slight and pale, with remarkable eyes. He was so disappointed--he seemed sure of finding her.”
”Well, no doubt he'll come back tomorrow.--You know we're expecting the whole party,” added Mrs. Amherst, to whom the imparting of good news was always an irresistible temptation.
Mrs. Dressel's interest deepened at once. ”Really? Mr. Langhope too?”
”Yes. It's a great pleasure to my son.”
”It must be! I'm so glad. I suppose in a way it will be rather sad for Mr. Langhope--seeing everything here so unchanged----”
Mrs. Amherst straightened herself a little. ”I think he will prefer to find it so,” she said, with a barely perceptible change of tone.