It was a new experience for Amherst to be acting under the pressure of another will; but during his return journey to Lynbrook that afternoon it was pure relief to surrender himself to this pressure, and the surrender brought not a sense of weakness but of recovered energy. It was not in his nature to analyze his motives, or spend his strength in weighing closely balanced alternatives of conduct; and though, during the last purposeless months, he had grown to brood over every spring of action in himself and others, this tendency disappeared at once in contact with the deed to be done. It was as though a tributary stream, gathering its crystal speed among the hills, had been suddenly poured into the stagnant waters of his will; and he saw now how thick and turbid those waters had become—how full of the slime- bred life that chokes the springs of courage.
His whole desire now was to be generous to his wife: to bear the full brunt of whatever pain their parting brought. Justine had said that Bessy seemed nervous and unhappy: it was clear, therefore, that she also had suffered from the wounds they had dealt each other, though she kept her unmoved front to the last. Poor child! Perhaps that insensible exterior was the only way she knew of expressing courage! It seemed to Amherst that all means of manifesting the finer impulses must slowly wither in the Lynbrook air. As he approached his destination, his thoughts of her were all pitiful: nothing remained of the personal resentment which had debased their parting. He had telephoned from town to announce the hour of his return, and when he emerged from the station he half- expected to find her seated in the brougham whose lamps signalled him through the early dusk. It would be like her to undergo such a reaction of feeling, and to express it, not in words, but by taking up their relation as if there had been no break in it. He had once condemned this facility of renewal as a sign of lightness, a result of that continual evasion of serious issues which made the life of Bessy’s world a thin crust of custom above a void of thought. But he now saw that, if she was the product of her environment, that constituted but another claim on his charity, and made the more precious any impulses of natural feeling that had survived the unifying pressure of her life. As he approached the brougham, he murmured mentally: “What if I were to try once more?”
Bessy had not come to meet him; but he said to himself that he should find her alone at the house, and that he would make his confession at once. As the carriage passed between the lights on the tall stone gate-posts, and rolled through the bare shrubberies of the avenue, he felt a momentary tightening of the heart—a sense of stepping back into the trap from which he had just wrenched himself free—a premonition of the way in which the smooth systematized routine of his wife’s existence might draw him back into its revolutions as he had once seen a careless factory hand seized and dragged into a flying belt….
But it was only for a moment; then his thoughts reverted to Bessy. It was she who was to be considered—this time he must be strong enough for both.
The butler met him on the threshold, flanked by the usual array of footmen; and as he saw his portmanteau ceremoniously passed from hand to hand, Amherst once more felt the steel of the springe on his neck.
“Is Mrs. Amherst in the drawing-room, Knowles?” he asked.
“No, sir,” said Knowles, who had too high a sense of fitness to volunteer any information beyond the immediate fact required of him.
“She has gone up to her sitting-room, then?” Amherst continued, turning toward the broad sweep of the stairway.
“No, sir,” said the butler slowly; “Mrs. Amherst has gone away.”
“Gone away?” Amherst stopped short, staring blankly at the man’s smooth official mask.
“This afternoon, sir; to Mapleside.”
“To Mapleside?”
“Yes, sir, by motor—to stay with Mrs. Carbury.”
There was a moment’s silence. It had all happened so quickly that Amherst, with the dual vision which comes at such moments, noticed that the third footman—or was it the fourth?—was just passing his portmanteau on to a shirt-sleeved arm behind the door which led to the servant’s wing….
He roused himself to look at the tall clock. It was just six. He had telephoned from town at two.
“At what time did Mrs. Amherst leave?”
The butler meditated. “Sharp at four, sir. The maid took the three-forty with the luggage.”
With the luggage! So it was not a mere one-night visit. The blood rose slowly to Amherst’s face. The footmen had disappeared, but presently the door at the back of the hall reopened, and one of them came out, carrying an elaborately-appointed tea-tray toward the smoking-room. The routine of the house was going on as if nothing had happened…. The butler looked at Amherst with respectful—too respectful—interrogation, and he was suddenly conscious that he was standing motionless in the middle of the hall, with one last intolerable question on his lips.
Well—it had to be spoken! “Did Mrs. Amherst receive my telephone message?”
“Yes, sir. I gave it to her myself.”
It occurred confusedly to Amherst that a well-bred man—as Lynbrook understood the phrase—would, at this point, have made some tardy feint of being in his wife’s confidence, of having, on second thoughts, no reason to be
