His reply that he would wait did not appear to hasten the leisurely process of her toilet, and he had the room to himself for a full half-hour. Many months had passed since he had spent so long a time in it, and though habitually unobservant of external details, he now found an outlet for his restlessness in mechanically noting the intimate appurtenances of Bessy’s life. He was at first merely conscious of a soothing harmony of line and colour, extending from the blurred tints of the rug to the subdued gleam of light on old picture-frames and on the slender flanks of porcelain vases; but gradually he began to notice how every chair and screen and cushion, and even every trifling utensil on the inlaid writing-desk, had been chosen with reference to the whole composition, and to the minutest requirements of a fastidious leisure. A few months ago this studied setting, if he had thought of it at all, would have justified itself as expressing the pretty woman’s natural affinity with pretty toys; but now it was the cost of it that struck him. He was beginning to learn from Bessy’s bills that no commodity is taxed as high as beauty, and the beauty about him filled him with sudden repugnance, as the disguise of the evil influences that were separating his wife’s life from his.
But with her entrance he dismissed the thought, and tried to meet her as if nothing stood in the way of their full communion. Her hair, still wet from the bath, broke from its dryad-like knot in dusky rings and spirals threaded with gold, and from her loose flexible draperies, and her whole person as she moved, there came a scent of youth and morning freshness. Her beauty touched him, and made it easier for him to humble himself.
“I was stupid and disagreeable last night. I can never say what I want when I have to count the minutes, and I’ve come back now for a quiet talk,” he began.
A shade of distrust passed over Bessy’s face. “About business?” she asked, pausing a few feet away from him.
“Don’t let us give it that name!” He went up to her and drew her two hands into his. “You used to call it our work—won’t you go back to that way of looking at it?”
Her hands resisted his pressure. “I didn’t know, then, that it was going to be the only thing you cared for–-“
But for her own sake he would not let her go on. “Some day I shall make you see how much my caring for it means my caring for you. But meanwhile,” he urged, “won’t you overcome your aversion to the subject, and bear with it as my work, if you no longer care to think of it as yours?”
Bessy, freeing herself, sat down on the edge of the straight-backed chair near the desk, as though to mark the parenthetical nature of the interview.
“I know you think me stupid—but wives are not usually expected to go into all the details of their husband’s business. I have told you to do whatever you wish at Westmore, and I can’t see why that is not enough.”
Amherst looked at her in surprise. Something in her quick mechanical utterance suggested that not only the thought but the actual words she spoke had been inspired, and he fancied he heard in them an echo of Blanche Carbury’s tones. Though Bessy’s intimacy with Mrs. Carbury was of such recent date, fragments of unheeded smoking-room gossip now recurred to confirm the vague antipathy which Amherst had felt for her the previous evening.
“I know that, among your friends, wives are not expected to interest themselves in their husbands’ work, and if the mills were mine I should try to conform to the custom, though I should always think it a pity that the questions that fill a man’s thoughts should be ruled out of his talk with his wife; but as it is, I am only your representative at Westmore, and I don’t see how we can help having the subject come up between us.”
Bessy remained silent, not as if acquiescing in his plea, but as though her own small stock of arguments had temporarily failed her; and he went on, enlarging on his theme with a careful avoidance of technical terms, and with the constant effort to keep the human and personal side of the question before her.
She listened without comment, her eyes fixed on a little jewelled letter-opener which she had picked up from the writing-table, and which she continued to turn in her fingers while he spoke.
The full development of Amherst’s plans at Westmore, besides resulting, as he had foreseen, in Truscomb’s resignation, and in Halford Gaines’s outspoken resistance to the new policy, had necessitated a larger immediate outlay of capital than the first estimates demanded, and Amherst, in putting his case to Bessy, was prepared to have her meet it on the old ground of the disapproval of all her advisers. But when he had ended she merely said, without looking up from the toy in her hand: “I always expected that you would need a great deal more money than you thought.”
The comment touched him at his most vulnerable point. “But you see why? You understand how the work has gone on growing—?”
His wife lifted her head to glance at him for a moment. “I am not sure that I understand,” she said indifferently; “but if another loan is necessary, of course I will sign the note for it.”
The words checked his reply by bringing up, before he was prepared to deal with it, the other and more embarrassing aspect of the question. He had hoped to reawaken in Bessy some feeling for the urgency of his task before having to take up the subject of its cost; but her cold anticipation of his demands as part of a disagreeable business to be despatched and put out of mind, doubled the difficulty of what he had left to say; and it occurred to him that she had perhaps foreseen and reckoned on this result.
He met her eyes gravely. “Another loan is necessary; but if any proper provision is to be made for paying it back, your expenses will have to be cut down a good deal for the next few months.”
The blood leapt to Bessy’s face. “My expenses? You seem to forget how much I’ve had to cut them down already.”
“The household bills certainly don’t show it. They are increasing steadily, and there have been some very heavy incidental payments lately.”
“What do you mean by incidental payments?”
“Well, there was the pair of cobs you bought last month–-“
She returned to a resigned contemplation of the letter-opener. “With only one motor, one must have more horses, of course.”
“The stables seemed to me fairly full before. But if you required more horses, I don’t see why, at this particular moment, it was also necessary to buy a set of Chinese vases for twenty-five hundred dollars.”
Bessy, at this, lifted her head with an air of decision that surprised him. Her blush had faded as quickly as it came, and he noticed that she was pale to the lips.
“I know you don’t care about such things; but I had an exceptional chance of securing the vases at a low price—they are really worth twice as much—and Dick always wanted a set of Ming for the drawing-room mantelpiece.”
Richard Westmore’s name was always tacitly avoided between them, for in Amherst’s case the disagreeable sense of dependence on a dead man’s bounty increased that feeling of obscure constraint and repugnance which any reminder of the first husband’s existence is wont to produce in his successor.
He reddened at the reply, and Bessy, profiting by an embarrassment which she had perhaps consciously provoked, went on hastily, and as if by rote: “I have left you perfectly free to do as you think best at the mills, but this perpetual discussion of my personal expenses is very unpleasant to me, as I am sure it must be to you, and in future I think it would be much better for us to have separate accounts.”
“Separate accounts?” Amherst echoed in genuine astonishment.
“I should like my personal expenses to be under my own control again—I have never been used to accounting for every penny I spend.”
The vertical lines deepened between Amherst’s brows. “You are of course free to spend your money as you like—and I thought you were doing so when you authorized me, last spring, to begin the changes at Westmore.”