“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.”
