“When she knows?” Her emotion sprang into her face. “When she knows? Then she does not— yet?”
“No. The offer came suddenly. I must go at once.”
“Without seeing her?” She cut him short with a quick commanding gesture. “Mr. Amherst, you can’t do this—you won’t do it! You will not go away without seeing Bessy!” she said.
Her eyes sought his and drew them upward, constraining them to meet the full beam of her rebuking gaze.
“I must do what seems best under the circumstances,” he answered hesitatingly. “She will hear from me, of course; I shall write today—and later–-“
“Not later! Now—you will go back now to Lynbrook! Such things can’t be told in writing—if they must be said at all, they must be spoken. Don’t tell me that I don’t understand—or that I’m meddling in what doesn’t concern me. I don’t care a fig for that! I’ve always meddled in what didn’t concern me—I always shall, I suppose, till I die! And I understand enough to know that Bessy is very unhappy—and that you’re the wiser and stronger of the two. I know what it’s been to you to give up your work—to feel yourself useless,” she interrupted herself, with softening eyes, “and I know how you’ve tried…I’ve watched you…but Bessy has tried too; and even if you’ve both failed—if you’ve come to the end of your resources—it’s for you to face the fact, and help her face it— not to run away from it like this!”
Amherst sat silent under the assault of her eloquence. He was conscious of no instinctive resentment, no sense that she was, as she confessed, meddling in matters which did not concern her. His ebbing spirit was revived by the shock of an ardour like his own. She had not shrunk from calling him a coward—and it did him good to hear her call him so! Her words put life back into its true perspective, restored their meaning to obsolete terms: to truth and manliness and courage. He had lived so long among equivocations that he had forgotten how to look a fact in the face; but here was a woman who judged life by his own standards—and by those standards she had found him wanting!
Still, he could not forget the last bitter hours, or change his opinion as to the futility of attempting to remain at Lynbrook. He felt as strongly as ever the need of moral and mental liberation—the right to begin life again on his own terms. But Justine Brent had made him see that his first step toward self-assertion had been the inconsistent one of trying to evade its results.
“You are right—I will go back,” he said.
She thanked him with her eyes, as she had thanked him on the terrace at Lynbrook, on the autumn evening which had witnessed their first broken exchange of confidences; and he was struck once more with the change that feeling produced in her. Emotions flashed across her face like the sweep of sunrent clouds over a quiet landscape, bringing out the gleam of hidden waters, the fervour of smouldering colours, all the subtle delicacies of modelling that are lost under the light of an open sky. And it was extraordinary how she could infuse into a principle the warmth and colour of a passion! If conduct, to most people, seemed a cold matter of social prudence or inherited habit, to her it was always the newly-discovered question of her own relation to life—as most women see the great issues only through their own wants and prejudices, so she seemed always to see her personal desires in the light of the larger claims.
“But I don’t think,” Amherst went on, “that anything can be said to convince me that I ought to alter my decision. These months of idleness have shown me that I’m one of the members of society who are a danger to the community if their noses are not kept to the grindstone–-“
Justine lowered her eyes musingly, and he saw she was undergoing the reaction of constraint which always followed on her bursts of unpremeditated frankness.
“That is not for me to judge,” she answered after a moment. “But if you decide to go away for a time—surely it ought to be in such a way that your going does not seem to cast any reflection on Bessy, or subject her to any unkind criticism.”
Amherst, reddening slightly, glanced at her in surprise. “I don’t think you need fear that—I shall be the only one criticized,” he said drily.
“Are you sure—if you take such a position as you spoke of? So few people understand the love of hard work for its own sake. They will say that your quarrel with your wife has driven you to support yourself—and that will be cruel to Bessy.”
Amherst shrugged his shoulders. “They’ll be more likely to say I tried to play the gentleman and failed, and wasn’t happy till I got back to my own place in life—which is true enough,” he added with a touch of irony.
“They may say that too; but they will make Bessy suffer first—and it will be your fault if she is humiliated in that way. If you decide to take up your factory work for a time, can’t you do so without—without accepting a salary? Oh, you see I stick at nothing,” she broke in upon herself with a laugh, “and Bessy has said things which make me see that she would suffer horribly if—if you put such a slight on her.” He remained silent, and she went on urgently: “From Bessy’s standpoint it would mean a decisive break—the repudiating of your whole past. And it is a question on which you can afford to be generous, because I know…I think…it’s less important in your eyes than hers….”
Amherst glanced at her quickly. “That particular form of indebtedness, you mean?”
