“
“A few minutes ago….”
“
He swept past her, shouldering her aside, pushing in an electric button as he sprang to the bed. She perceived then that the room had been almost in darkness. She recovered command of herself, and followed him. He was going through the usual rapid examination—pulse, heart, breath—hanging over the bed like some angry animal balked of its prey. Then he lifted the lids and bent close above the eyes.
“Take the shade off that lamp!” he commanded.
Justine obeyed him.
He stooped down again to examine the eyes…he remained stooping a long time. Suddenly he stood up and faced her.
“Had she been in great pain?”
“Yes.”
“Worse than usual?”
“Yes.”
“What had you done?”
“Nothing—there was no time.”
“No time?” He broke off to sweep the room again with his excited incredulous glance. “Where are the others? Why were you here alone?” he demanded.
“It came suddenly. I was going to call–-“
Their eyes met for a moment. Her face was perfectly calm—she could feel that her lips no longer trembled. She was not in the least afraid of Wyant’s scrutiny.
As he continued to look at her, his expression slowly passed from incredulous wrath to something softer—more human—she could not tell what….
“This has been too much for you—go and send one of the others…. It’s all over,” he said.
BOOK IV
XXX
ON a September day, somewhat more than a year and a half after Bessy Amherst’s death, her husband and his mother sat at luncheon in the dining-room of the Westmore house at Hanaford.
The house was John Amherst’s now, and shortly after the loss of his wife he had established himself there with his mother. By a will made some six months before her death, Bessy had divided her estate between her husband and daughter, placing Cicely’s share in trust, and appointing Mr. Langhope and Amherst as her guardians. As the latter was also her trustee, the whole management of the estate devolved on him, while his control of the Westmore mills was ensured by his receiving a slightly larger proportion of the stock than his stepdaughter.
The will had come as a surprise, not only to Amherst himself, but to his wife’s family, and more especially to her legal adviser. Mr. Tredegar had in fact had nothing to do with the drawing of the instrument; but as it had been drawn in due form, and by a firm of excellent standing, he was obliged, in spite of his private views, and Mr. Langhope’s open adjurations that he should “do something,” to declare that there was no pretext for questioning the validity of the document.
To Amherst the will was something more than a proof of his wife’s confidence: it came as a reconciling word from her grave. For the date showed that it had been made at a moment when he supposed himself to have lost all influence over her—on the morrow of the day when she had stipulated that he should give up the management of the Westmore mills, and yield the care of her property to Mr. Tredegar.
While she smote him with one hand, she sued for pardon with the other; and the contradiction was so characteristic, it explained and excused in so touching a way the inconsistencies of her impulsive heart and hesitating mind, that he was filled with that tender compunction, that searching sense of his own shortcomings, which generous natures feel when they find they have underrated the generosity of others. But Amherst’s was not an introspective mind, and his sound moral sense told him, when the first pang of self-reproach had subsided, that he had done his best by his wife, and was in no way to blame if her recognition of the fact had come too late. The self-reproach subsided; and, instead of the bitterness of the past, it left a softened memory which made him take up his task with the sense that he was now working with Bessy and not against her.
Yet perhaps, after all, it was chiefly the work itself which had healed old wounds, and quelled the tendency to vain regrets. Amherst was only thirty-four; and in the prime of his energies the task he was made for had been given back to him. To a sound nature, which finds its outlet in fruitful action, nothing so simplifies the complexities of life, so tends to a large acceptance of its vicissitudes and mysteries, as the sense of doing something each day toward clearing one’s own bit of the wilderness. And this was the joy at last conceded to Amherst. The mills were virtually his; and the fact that he ruled them not only in his own right but as Cicely’s representative, made him doubly eager to justify his wife’s trust in him.
Mrs. Amherst, looking up from a telegram which the parlour-maid had handed her, smiled across the table at her son.
“From Maria Ansell—they are all coming tomorrow.”
“Ah—that’s good,” Amherst rejoined. “I should have been sorry if Cicely had not been here.”
“Mr. Langhope is coming too,” his mother continued. “I’m glad of that, John.”
“Yes,” Amherst again assented.
The morrow was to be a great day at Westmore. The Emergency Hospital, planned in the first months of his marriage, and abandoned in the general reduction of expenditure at the mills, had now been completed on a larger and more elaborate scale, as a memorial to Bessy. The strict retrenchment of all personal expenses, and the
