As they turned to retrace their steps a yellow line of light through the tree-trunks showed them that they had not, after all, gone very deep into the wood. A few minutes’ walk would restore them to the lingering daylight, and on the farther side of the meadow stood the sleigh which was to carry Bessy back to Hanaford. A sudden sense of the evanescence of the moment roused Amherst from his absorption. Before the next change in the fading light he would be back again among the ugly realities of life. Did she, too, hate to return to them? Or why else did she walk so slowly—why did she seem as much afraid as himself to break the silence that held them in its magic circle?
A dead pine-branch caught in the edge of her skirt, and she stood still while Amherst bent down to release her. As she turned to help him he looked up with a smile.
“The wood doesn’t want to let you go,” he said.
She made no reply, and he added, rising: “But you’ll come back to it—you’ll come back often, I hope.”
He could not see her face in the dimness, but her voice trembled a little as she answered: “I will do what you tell me—but I shall be alone—against all the others: they don’t understand.”
The simplicity, the helplessness, of the avowal, appealed to him not as a weakness but as a grace. He understood what she was really saying: “How can you desert me? How can you put this great responsibility on me, and then leave me to bear it alone?” and in the light of her unuttered appeal his action seemed almost like cruelty. Why had he opened her eyes to wrongs she had no strength to redress without his aid?
He could only answer, as he walked beside her toward the edge of the wood: “You will not be alone—in time you will make the others understand; in time they will be with you.”
“Ah, you don’t believe that!” she exclaimed, pausing suddenly, and speaking with an intensity of reproach that amazed him.
“I hope it, at any rate,” he rejoined, pausing also. “And I’m sure that if you will come here oftener—if you’ll really live among your people–-“
“How can you say that, when you’re deserting them?” she broke in, with a feminine excess of inconsequence that fairly dashed the words from his lips.
“Deserting them? Don’t you understand–-?”
“I understand that you’ve made Mr. Gaines and Truscomb angry—yes; but if I should insist on your staying–-“
Amherst felt the blood rush to his forehead. “No—no, it’s not possible!” he exclaimed, with a vehemence addressed more to himself than to her.
“Then what will happen at the mills?”
“Oh, some one else will be found—the new ideas are stirring everywhere. And if you’ll only come back here, and help my successor–-“
“Do you think they are likely to choose any one else with your ideas?” she interposed with unexpected acuteness; and after a short silence he answered: “Not immediately, perhaps; but in time—in time there will be improvements.”
“As if the poor people could wait! Oh, it’s cruel, cruel of you to go!”
Her voice broke in a throb of entreaty that went to his inmost fibres.
“You don’t understand. It’s impossible in the present state of things that I should do any good by staying.”
“Then you refuse? Even if I were to insist on their asking you to stay, you would still refuse?” she persisted.
“Yes—I should still refuse.”
She made no answer, but moved a few steps nearer to the edge of the wood. The meadow was just below them now, and the sleigh in plain sight on the height beyond. Their steps made no sound on the sodden drifts underfoot, and in the silence he thought he heard a catch in her breathing. It was enough to make the brimming moment overflow. He stood still before her and bent his head to hers.
“Bessy!” he said, with sudden vehemence.
She did not speak or move, but in the quickened state of his perceptions he became aware that she was silently weeping. The gathering darkness under the trees enveloped them. It absorbed her outline into the shadowy background of the wood, from which her face emerged in a faint spot of pallor; and the same obscurity seemed to envelop his faculties, merging the hard facts of life in a blur of feeling in which the distinctest impression was the sweet sense of her tears.
“Bessy!” he exclaimed again; and as he drew a step nearer he felt her yield to him, and bury her sobs against his arm.
BOOK II
IX
“BUT, Justine–-“
Mrs. Harry Dressel, seated in the June freshness of her Oak Street drawing-room, and harmonizing by her high lights and hard edges with the white-and-gold angularities of the best furniture, cast a rebuking eye on her friend Miss Brent, who stood arranging in a glass bowl the handful of roses she had just brought in from the garden.
Mrs. Dressel’s intonation made it clear that the entrance of Miss Brent had been the signal for renewing an argument which the latter had perhaps left the room to escape.
“When you were here three years ago, Justine, I could understand your not wanting to go out, because you were in mourning for your mother—and besides, you’d volunteered for that bad surgical case in the Hope Hospital. But now that you’ve come back for a rest and a change I can’t imagine why you persist in shutting yourself up— unless, of course,” she concluded, in a higher key of reproach, “it’s because you think so little of Hanaford society–-“
Justine Brent, putting the last rose in place, turned from her task with a protesting gesture.
