Duplain was in the passage; he had just come out of the kitchen, and the fact that he had been washing his hands in the sink was made evident by his rolled-back shirt-sleeves, and by the shiny redness of the knuckles he was running through his stiff black hair.
“Hallo, John,” he said, in his aggressive voice, which rose abruptly at sight of Amherst’s companions; and at the same moment the frowsy maid-of-all-work, crimson from stooping over the kitchen stove, thrust her head out to call after him: “See here, Mr. Duplain, don’t you leave your cravat laying round in my dough.”
V
MRS. WESTMORE stayed just long enough not to break in too abruptly on the flow of her friend’s reminiscences, and to impress herself on Mrs. Amherst’s delighted eyes as an embodiment of tactfulness and grace—looking sympathetically about the little room, which, with its books, its casts, its photographs of memorable pictures, seemed, after all, a not incongruous setting to her charms; so that when she rose to go, saying, as her hand met Amherst’s, “Tonight, then, you must tell me all about those poor Dillons,” he had the sense of having penetrated so far into her intimacy that a new Westmore must inevitably result from their next meeting.
“Say, John—the boss is a looker,” Duplain commented across the dinner-table, with the slangy grossness he sometimes affected; but Amherst left it to his mother to look a quiet rebuke, feeling himself too aloof from such contacts to resent them.
He had to rouse himself with an effort to take in the overseer’s next observation. “There was another lady at the office this morning,” Duplain went on, while the two men lit their cigars in the porch. “Asking after you—tried to get me to show her over the mills when I said you were busy.”
“Asking after me? What did she look like?”
“Well, her face was kinder white and small, with an awful lot of black hair fitting close to it. Said she came from Hope Hospital.”
Amherst looked up. “Did you show her over?” he asked with sudden interest.
Duplain laughed slangily. “What? Me? And have Truscomb get on to it and turn me down? How’d I know she wasn’t a yellow reporter?”
Amherst uttered an impatient exclamation. “I wish to heaven a yellow reporter would go through these mills, and show them up in head-lines a yard high!”
He regretted not having seen the nurse again: he felt sure she would have been interested in the working of the mills, and quick to notice the signs of discouragement and ill-health in the workers’ faces; but a moment later his regret was dispelled by the thought of his visit to Mrs. Westmore. The afternoon hours dragged slowly by in the office, where he was bound to his desk by Truscomb’s continued absence; but at length the evening whistle blew, the clerks in the outer room caught their hats from the rack, Duplain presented himself with the day’s report, and the two men were free to walk home.
Two hours later Amherst was mounting Mrs. Westmore’s steps; and his hand was on the bell when the door opened and Dr. Disbrow came out. The physician drew back, as if surprised and slightly disconcerted; but his smile promptly effaced all signs of vexation, and he held his hand out affably.
“A fine evening, Mr. Amherst. I’m glad to say I have been able to bring Mrs. Westmore an excellent report of both patients—Mr. Truscomb, I mean, and poor Dillon. This mild weather is all in their favour, and I hope my brother-in-law will be about in a day or two.” He passed on with a nod.
Amherst was once more shown into the library where he had found Mrs. Westmore that morning; but on this occasion it was Mr. Tredegar who rose to meet him, and curtly waved him to a seat at a respectful distance from his own. Amherst at once felt a change of atmosphere, and it was easy to guess that the lowering of temperature was due to Dr. Disbrow’s recent visit. The thought roused the young man’s combative instincts, and caused him to say, as Mr. Tredegar continued to survey him in silence from the depths of a capacious easy-chair: “I understood from Mrs. Westmore that she wished to see me this evening.”
It was the wrong note, and he knew it; but he had been unable to conceal his sense of the vague current of opposition in the air.
“Quite so: I believe she asked you to come,” Mr. Tredegar assented, laying his hands together vertically, and surveying Amherst above the acute angle formed by his parched finger-tips. As he leaned back, small, dry, dictatorial, in the careless finish of his evening dress and pearl-studded shirt-front, his appearance put the finishing touch to Amherst’s irritation. He felt the incongruousness of his rough clothes in this atmosphere of after-dinner ease, the mud on his walking-boots, the clinging cotton-dust which seemed to have entered into the very pores of the skin; and again his annoyance escaped in his voice.
“Perhaps I have come too early—” he began; but Mr. Tredegar interposed with glacial amenity: “No, I believe you are exactly on time; but Mrs. Westmore is unexpectedly detained. The fact is, Mr. and Mrs. Halford Gaines are dining with her, and she has delegated to me the duty of hearing what you have to say.”
Amherst hesitated. His impulse was to exclaim: “There is no duty about it!” but a moment’s thought showed the folly of thus throwing up the game. With the prospect of Truscomb’s being about again in a day or two, it might well be that this was his last chance of reaching Mrs. Westmore’s ear; and he was bound to put his case while he could, irrespective of personal feeling. But his disappointment was too keen to be denied, and after a pause he said: “Could I not speak with Mrs. Westmore later?”
Mr. Tredegar’s cool survey deepened to a frown. The young man’s importunity was really out of proportion to what he signified. “Mrs. Westmore has asked me to replace her,” he said, putting his previous statement more concisely.
“Then I am not to see her at all?” Amherst exclaimed; and the lawyer replied indifferently: “I am afraid not, as she leaves tomorrow.”
Mr. Tredegar was in his element when refusing a favour. Not that he was by nature unkind; he was, indeed, capable of a cold beneficence; but to deny what it was in his power to accord was the readiest way of proclaiming his authority, that power of loosing and binding which made him regard himself as almost consecrated to his office.
Having sacrificed to this principle, he felt free to add as a gratuitous concession to politeness: “You are perhaps not aware that I am Mrs. Westmore’s lawyer, and one of the executors under her husband’s will.”
He dropped this negligently, as though conscious of the absurdity of presenting his credentials to a subordinate; but his manner no longer incensed Amherst: it merely strengthened his resolve to sink all sense of affront in the supreme effort of obtaining a hearing.
“With that stuffed canary to advise her,” he reflected, “there’s no hope for her unless I can assert myself now”; and the unconscious wording of his thought expressed his inward sense that Bessy Westmore stood in greater need of help than her work-people.
Still he hesitated, hardly knowing how to begin. To Mr. Tredegar he was no more than an underling, without authority to speak in his superior’s absence; and the lack of an official warrant, which he could have disregarded in appealing to Mrs. Westmore, made it hard for him to find a good opening in addressing her representative. He saw, too, from Mr. Tredegar’s protracted silence, that the latter counted on the effect of this embarrassment, and was resolved not to minimize it by giving him a lead; and this had the effect of increasing his caution.