great deal better.”
She summed up with a light nod, which included both Amherst and his mother, and turning to descend the verandah steps, waved a signal to Mr. Langhope, who was limping disconsolately toward the house.
“What has she been saying to you, mother?” Amherst asked, returning to his seat beside his mother.
Mrs. Amherst replied by a shake of her head and a raised forefinger of reproval. “Now, Johnny, I won’t answer a single question till you smooth out those lines between your eyes.”
Her son relaxed his frown to smile back at her. “Well, dear, there have to be some wrinkles in every family, and as you absolutely refuse to take your share—” His eyes rested affectionately on the frosty sparkle of her charming old face, which had, in its setting of recovered prosperity, the freshness of a sunny winter morning, when the very snow gives out a suggestion of warmth.
He remembered how, on the evening of his dismissal from the mills, he had paused on the threshold of their sitting-room to watch her a moment in the lamplight, and had thought with bitter compunction of the fresh wrinkle he was about to add to the lines about her eyes. The three years which followed had effaced that wrinkle and veiled the others in a tardy bloom of well-being. From the moment of turning her back on Westmore, and establishing herself in the pretty little house at Hanaford which her son’s wife had placed at her disposal, Mrs. Amherst had shed all traces of the difficult years; and the fact that his marriage had enabled him to set free, before it was too late, the pent-up springs of her youthfulness, sometimes seemed to Amherst the clearest gain in his life’s confused total of profit and loss. It was, at any rate, the sense of Bessy’s share in the change that softened his voice when he spoke of her to his mother.
“Now, then, if I present a sufficiently unruffled surface, let us go back to Mrs. Ansell—for I confess that her mysterious reasons are not yet apparent to me.”
Mrs. Amherst looked deprecatingly at her son. “Maria Ansell is devoted to you too, John–-“
“Of course she is! It’s her
“Her enemies?”
“Oh, I didn’t intend any personal application. But why does she want me to take Bessy abroad?”
“She and Mr. Langhope think that Bessy is not looking well.”
Amherst paused, and the frown showed itself for a moment. “What do
“I hadn’t noticed it myself: Bessy seems to me prettier than ever. But perhaps she has less colour—and she complains of not sleeping. Maria thinks she still frets over the baby.”
Amherst made an impatient gesture. “Is Europe the only panacea?”
“You should consider, John, that Bessy is used to change and amusement. I think you sometimes forget that other people haven’t your faculty of absorbing themselves in a single interest. And Maria says that the new doctor at Clifton, whom they seem to think so clever, is very anxious that Bessy should go to Europe this summer.”
“No doubt; and so is every one else: I mean her father and old Tredegar—and your friend Mrs. Ansell not least.”
Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright black eyes to his. “Well, then—if they all think she needs it–-“
“Good heavens, if travel were what she needed!—Why, we’ve never stopped travelling since we married. We’ve been everywhere on the globe except at Hanaford—this is her second visit here in three years!” He rose and took a rapid turn across the deserted verandah. “It’s not because her health requires it—it’s to get me away from Westmore, to prevent things being done there that ought to be done!” he broke out vehemently, halting again before his mother.
The aged pink faded from Mrs. Amherst’s face, but her eyes retained their lively glitter. “To prevent things being done? What a strange thing to say!”
“I shouldn’t have said it if I hadn’t seen you falling under Mrs. Ansell’s spell.”
His mother had a gesture which showed from whom he had inherited his impulsive movements. “Really, my son—!” She folded her hands, and added after a pause of self-recovery: “If you mean that I have ever attempted to interfere–-“
“No, no: but when they pervert things so damnably–-“
“John!”
He dropped into his chair again, and pushed the hair from his forehead with a groan.
“Well, then—put it that they have as much right to their view as I have: I only want you to see what it is. Whenever I try to do anything at Westmore—to give a real start to the work that Bessy and I planned together— some pretext is found to stop it: to pack us off to the ends of the earth, to cry out against reducing her income, to encourage her in some new extravagance to which the work at the mills must be sacrificed!”
Mrs. Amherst, growing pale under this outbreak, assured herself by a nervous backward glance that their privacy was still uninvaded; then her eyes returned to her son’s face.
“John—are you sure you’re not sacrificing your wife to the mills?”
He grew pale in turn, and they looked at each other for a moment without speaking.
“You see it as they do, then?” he rejoined with a discouraged sigh.
“I see it as any old woman would, who had my experiences to look back to.”
“Mother!” he exclaimed.
She smiled composedly. “Do you think I mean that as a reproach? That’s because men will never understand women—least of all, sons their mothers. No real mother wants to come first; she puts her son’s career ahead of everything. But it’s different with a wife—and a wife as much in love as Bessy.”
