Happily for him, chance made this crisis of his life coincide with a strike at Westmore. Soon after his return to Hanaford he found himself compelled to grapple with the hardest problem of his industrial career, and he was carried through the ensuing three months on that tide of swift obligatory action that sweeps the ship-wrecked spirit over so many sunken reefs of fear and despair. The knowledge that he was better able to deal with the question than any one who might conceivably have taken his place—this conviction, which was presently confirmed by the peaceable adjustment of the strike, helped to make the sense of his immediate usefulness outbalance that other, disintegrating doubt as to the final value of such efforts. And so he tried to settle down into a kind of mechanical altruism, in which the reflexes of habit should take the place of that daily renewal of faith and enthusiasm which had been fed from the springs of his own joy.
The autumn came and passed into winter; and after Mr. Langhope’s reestablishment in town Amherst began to resume his usual visits to his stepdaughter.
His natural affection for the little girl had been deepened by the unforeseen manner in which her fate had been entrusted to him. The thought of Bessy, softened to compunction by the discovery that her love had persisted under their apparently hopeless estrangement—this feeling, intensified to the verge of morbidness by the circumstances attending her death, now sought expression in a passionate devotion to her child. Accident had, in short, created between Bessy and himself a retrospective sympathy which the resumption of life together would have dispelled in a week—one of the exhalations from the past that depress the vitality of those who linger too near the grave of dead experiences.
Since Justine’s departure Amherst had felt himself still more drawn to Cicely; but his relation to the child was complicated by the fact that she would not be satisfied as to the cause of her stepmother’s absence. Whenever Amherst came to town, her first question was for Justine; and her memory had the precocious persistence sometimes developed in children too early deprived of their natural atmosphere of affection. Cicely had always been petted and adored, at odd times and by divers people; but some instinct seemed to tell her that, of all the tenderness bestowed on her, Justine’s most resembled the all-pervading motherly element in which the child’s heart expands without ever being conscious of its needs.
If it had been embarrassing to evade Cicely’s questions in June it became doubly so as the months passed, and the pretext of Justine’s ill-health grew more and more difficult to sustain. And in the following March Amherst was suddenly called from Hanaford by the news that the little girl herself was ill. Serious complications had developed from a protracted case of scarlet fever, and for two weeks the child’s fate was uncertain. Then she began to recover, and in the joy of seeing life come back to her, Mr. Langhope and Amherst felt as though they must not only gratify every wish she expressed, but try to guess at those they saw floating below the surface of her clear vague eyes.
It was noticeable to Mrs. Ansell, if not to the others, that one of these unexpressed wishes was the desire to see her stepmother. Cicely no longer asked for Justine; but something in her silence, or in the gesture with which she gently put from her other offers of diversion and companionship, suddenly struck Mrs. Ansell as more poignant than speech.
“What is it the child wants?” she asked the governess, in the course of one of their whispered consultations; and the governess, after a moment’s hesitation, replied: “She said something about a letter she wrote to Mrs. Amherst just before she was taken ill—about having had no answer, I think.”
“Ah—she writes to Mrs. Amherst, does she?”
The governess, evidently aware that she trod on delicate ground, tried at once to defend herself and her pupil.
“It was my fault, perhaps. I suggested once that her little compositions should take the form of letters—it usually interests a child more—and she asked if they might be written to Mrs. Amherst.”
“Your fault? Why should not the child write to her stepmother?” Mrs. Ansell rejoined with studied surprise; and on the other’s murmuring: “Of course—of course–-” she added haughtily: “I trust the letters were sent?”
The governess floundered. “I couldn’t say—but perhaps the nurse….”
That evening Cicely was less well. There was a slight return of fever, and the doctor, hastily summoned, hinted at the possibility of too much excitement in the sick-room.
“Excitement? There has been no excitement,” Mr. Langhope protested, quivering with the sudden renewal of fear.
“No? The child seemed nervous, uneasy. It’s hard to say why, because she is unusually reserved for her age.”
The medical man took his departure, and Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell faced each other in the disarray produced by a call to arms when all has seemed at peace.
“I shall lose her—I shall lose her!” the grandfather broke out, sinking into his chair with a groan.
Mrs. Ansell, gathering up her furs for departure, turned on him abruptly from the threshold.
“It’s stupid, what you’re doing—stupid!” she exclaimed with unwonted vehemence.
He raised his head with a startled look. “What do you mean—what I’m doing?”
“The child misses Justine. You ought to send for her.”
Mr. Langhope’s hands dropped to the arms of his chair, and he straightened himself up with a pale flash of indignation. “You’ve had moments lately–-!”
“I’ve had moments, yes; and so have you—when the child came back to us, and we stood there and wondered how we could keep her, tie her fast…and in those moments I saw…saw what she wanted…and so did you!”
Mr. Langhope turned away his head. “You’re a sentimentalist!” he flung scornfully back.
“Oh, call me any bad names you please!”
“I won’t send for that woman!”
“No.” She fastened her furs slowly, with the gentle deliberate movements that no emotion ever hastened or disturbed.
“Why do you say no?” he challenged her.
“To make you contradict me, perhaps,” she ventured, after looking at him again.
“Ah–-” He shifted his position, one elbow supporting his bowed head, his eyes fixed on the ground. Presently he brought out: “Could one ask her to come—and see the child—and go away again—for good?”
“To break the compact at your pleasure, and enter into it again for the same reason?”
“No—no—I see.” He paused, and then looked up at her suddenly. “But what if Amherst won’t have her back himself?”