The furrows of misery deepened in Mr. Langhope’s face. “Maria—don’t ask too much of me! I can’t go over it again. She says she wanted to spare my child—she says the doctors were keeping her alive, torturing her uselessly, as a…a sort of scientific experiment…. She forced on me the hideous details….”
Mrs. Ansell waited a moment.
“Well! May it not be true?”
“Wyant’s version is different. He says Bessy would have recovered—he says Garford thought so too.”
“And what does she answer? She denies it?”
“No. She admits that Garford was in doubt. But she says the chance was too remote—the pain too bad…that’s her cue, naturally!”
Mrs. Ansell, leaning back in her chair, with hands meditatively stretched along its arms, gave herself up to silent consideration of the fragmentary statements cast before her. The long habit of ministering to her friends in moments of perplexity and distress had given her an almost judicial keenness in disentangling and coordinating facts incoherently presented, and in seizing on the thread of motive that connected them; but she had never before been confronted with a situation so poignant in itself, and bearing so intimately on her personal feelings; and she needed time to free her thoughts from the impending rush of emotion.
At last she raised her head and said: “Why did Mr. Amherst let her come to you, instead of coming himself?”
“He knows nothing of her being here. She persuaded him to wait a day, and as soon as he had gone to the mills this morning she took the first train to town.”
“Ah–-” Mrs. Ansell murmured thoughtfully; and Mr. Langhope rejoined, with a conclusive gesture: “Do you want more proofs of panic-stricken guilt?”
“Oh, guilt—” His friend revolved her large soft muff about a drooping hand. “There’s so much still to understand.”
“Your mind does not, as a rule, work so slowly!” he said with some asperity; but she paid no heed to his tone.
“Amherst, for instance—how long has he known of this?” she continued.
“A week or two only—she made that clear.”
“And what is his attitude?”
“Ah—that, I conjecture, is just what she means to keep us from knowing!”
“You mean she’s afraid–-?”
Mr. Langhope gathered his haggard brows in a frown. “She’s afraid, of course—mortally—I never saw a woman more afraid. I only wonder she had the courage to face me.”
“Ah—that’s it! Why did she face you? To extenuate her act—to give you her version, because she feared his might be worse? Do you gather that that was her motive?”
It was Mr. Langhope’s turn to hesitate. He furrowed the thick Turkey rug with the point of his ebony stick, pausing once or twice to revolve it gimlet-like in a gap of the pile.
“Not her avowed motive, naturally.”
“Well—at least, then, let me have that.”
“Her avowed motive? Oh, she’d prepared one, of course—trust her to have a dozen ready! The one she produced was—simply the desire to protect her husband.”
“Her husband? Does he too need protection?”
“My God, if he takes her side–-! At any rate, her fear seemed to be that what she had done might ruin him; might cause him to feel—as well he may!—that the mere fact of being her husband makes his situation as Cicely’s step-father, as my son-in-law, intolerable. And she came to clear him, as it were—to find out, in short, on what terms I should be willing to continue my present relations with him as though this hideous thing had not been known to me.”
Mrs. Ansell raised her head quickly. “Well—and what were your terms?”
