The Fruit of the Tree by Edith Wharton (best large ebook reader txt) 📖

pardon, and continue for the present in the mechanical performance of his duties. He had just brought himself to this leaden state of acquiescence when one of the clerks in the outer office thrust his head in to say: "A lady asking for you--" and looking up, Amherst beheld Bessy Westmore.

She came in alone, with an air of high self-possession in marked contrast to her timidity and indecision of the previous day. Amherst thought she looked taller, more majestic; so readily may the upward slant of a soft chin, the firmer line of yielding brows, add a cubit to the outward woman. Her aspect was so commanding that he fancied she had come to express her disapproval of his conduct, to rebuke him for lack of respect to Mr. Tredegar; but a moment later it became clear, even to his inexperienced perceptions, that it was not to himself that her challenge was directed.

She advanced toward the seat he had moved forward, but in her absorption forgot to seat herself, and stood with her clasped hands resting on the back of the chair.

"I have come back to talk to you," she began, in her sweet voice with its occasional quick lift of appeal. "I knew that, in Mr. Truscomb's absence, it would be hard for you to leave the mills, and there are one or two things I want you to explain before I go away--some of the things, for instance, that you spoke to Mr. Tredegar about last night."

Amherst's feeling of constraint returned. "I'm afraid I expressed myself badly; I may have annoyed him--" he began.

She smiled this away, as though irrelevant to the main issue. "Perhaps you don't quite understand each other--but I am sure you can make it clear to me." She sank into the chair, resting one arm on the edge of the desk behind which he had resumed his place. "That is the reason why I came alone," she continued. "I never can understand when a lot of people are trying to tell me a thing all at once. And I don't suppose I care as much as a man would--a lawyer especially--about the forms that ought to be observed. All I want is to find out what is wrong and how to remedy it."

Her blue eyes met Amherst's in a look that flowed like warmth about his heart. How should he have doubted that her feelings were as exquisite as her means of expressing them? The iron bands of distrust were loosened from his spirit, and he blushed for his cheap scepticism of the morning. In a woman so evidently nurtured in dependence, whose views had been formed, and her actions directed, by the most conventional influences, the mere fact of coming alone to Westmore, in open defiance of her advisers, bespoke a persistence of purpose that put his doubts to shame.

"It will make a great difference to the people here if you interest yourself in them," he rejoined. "I tried to explain to Mr. Tredegar that I had no wish to criticise the business management of the mills--even if there had been any excuse for my doing so--but that I was sure the condition of the operatives could be very much improved, without permanent harm to the business, by any one who felt a personal sympathy for them; and in the end I believe such sympathy produces better work, and so benefits the employer materially." She listened with her gentle look of trust, as though committing to him, with the good faith of a child, her ignorance, her credulity, her little rudimentary convictions and her little tentative aspirations, relying on him not to abuse or misdirect them in the boundless supremacy of his masculine understanding.

"That is just what I want you to explain to me," she said. "But first I should like to know more about the poor man who was hurt. I meant to see his wife yesterday, but Mr. Gaines told me she would be at work till six, and it would have been difficult to go after that. I _did_ go to the hospital; but the man was sleeping--is Dillon his name?--and the matron told us he was much better. Dr. Disbrow came in the evening and said the same thing--told us it was all a false report about his having been so badly hurt, and that Mr. Truscomb was very much annoyed when he heard of your having said, before the operatives, that Dillon would lose his arm."

Amherst smiled. "Ah--Mr. Truscomb heard that? Well, he's right to be annoyed: I ought not to have said it when I did. But unfortunately I am not the only one to be punished. The operative who tied on the black cloth was dismissed this morning."

Mrs. Westmore flamed up. "Dismissed for that? Oh, how unjust--how cruel!"

"You must look at both sides of the case," said Amherst, finding it much easier to remain temperate in the glow he had kindled than if he had had to force his own heat into frozen veins. "Of course any act of insubordination must be reprimanded--but I think a reprimand would have been enough."

It gave him an undeniable throb of pleasure to find that she was not to be checked by such arguments. "But he shall be put back--I won't have any one discharged for such a reason! You must find him for me at once--you must tell him----"

Once more Amherst gently restrained her. "If you'll forgive my saying so, I think it is better to let him go, and take his chance of getting work elsewhere. If he were taken back he might be made to suffer. As things are organized here, the hands are very much at the mercy of the overseers, and the overseer in that room would be likely to make it uncomfortable for a hand who had so openly defied him."

With a heavy sigh she bent her puzzled brows on him. "How complicated it is! I wonder if I shall ever understand it all. _You_ don't think Dillon's accident was his own fault, then?"

"Certainly not; there are too many cards in that room. I pointed out the fact to Mr. Truscomb when the new machines were set up three years ago. An operative may be ever so expert with his fingers, and yet not learn to measure his ordinary movements quite as accurately as if he were an automaton; and that is what a man must do to be safe in the carding-room."

She sighed again. "The more you tell me, the more difficult it all seems. Why is the carding-room so over-crowded?"

"To make it pay better," Amherst returned bluntly; and the colour flushed her sensitive skin.

He thought she was about to punish him for his plain-speaking; but she went on after a pause: "What you say is dreadful. Each thing seems to lead back to another--and I feel so ignorant of it all." She hesitated again, and then said, turning her bluest glance on him: "I am going to be quite frank with you, Mr. Amherst. Mr. Tredegar repeated to me what you said to him last night, and I think he was annoyed that you were unwilling to give any proof of the charges you made."

"Charges? Ah," Amherst exclaimed, with a start of recollection, "he means my refusing to say who told me that Dr. Disbrow was not telling the truth about Dillon?"

"Yes. He said that was a very grave accusation to make, and that no one should have made it without being able to give proof."

"That is quite true, theoretically. But in this case it would be easy for you or Mr. Tredegar to find out whether I was right."

"But Mr. Tredegar said you refused to say who told you."

"I was bound to, as it happened. But I am not bound to prevent your trying to get the same information."

"Ah--" she murmured understandingly; and, a sudden thought striking him, he went on, with a glance at the clock: "If you really wish to judge for yourself, why not go to the hospital now? I shall be free in five minutes, and could go with you if you wish it."

Amherst had remembered the nurse's cry of recognition when she saw Mrs. Westmore's face under the street-lamp; and it immediately occurred to him that, if the two women had really known each other, Mrs. Westmore would have no difficulty in obtaining the information she wanted; while, even if they met as strangers, the dark-eyed girl's perspicacity might still be trusted to come to their aid. It remained only to be seen how Mrs. Westmore would take his suggestion; but some instinct was already telling him that the highhanded method was the one she really preferred.

"To the hospital--now? I should like it of all things," she exclaimed, rising with what seemed an almost childish zest in the adventure. "Of course that is the best way of finding out. I ought to have insisted on seeing Dillon yesterday--but I begin to think the matron didn't want me to."

Amherst left this inference to work itself out in her mind, contenting himself, as they drove back to Hanaford, with answering her questions about Dillon's family, the ages of his children, and his wife's health. Her enquiries, he noticed, did not extend from the particular to the general: her curiosity, as yet, was too purely personal and emotional to lead to any larger consideration of the question. But this larger view might grow out of the investigation of Dillon's case; and meanwhile Amherst's own purposes were momentarily lost in the sweet confusion of feeling her near him--of seeing the exquisite grain of her skin, the way her lashes grew out of a dusky line on the edge of the white lids, the way her hair, stealing in spirals of light from brow to ear, wavered off into a fruity down on the edge of the cheek.

At the hospital they were protestingly admitted by Mrs. Ogan, though the official "visitors' hour" was not till the afternoon; and beside the sufferer's bed, Amherst saw again that sudden flowering of compassion which seemed the key to his companion's beauty: as though her lips had been formed for consolation and her hands for tender offices. It was clear enough that Dillon, still sunk in a torpor broken by feverish tossings, was making no perceptible progress toward recovery; and Mrs. Ogan was reduced to murmuring some technical explanation about the state of the wound while Bessy hung above him with reassuring murmurs as to his wife's fate, and promises that the children should be cared for.

Amherst had noticed, on entering, that a new nurse--a gaping young woman instantly lost in the study of Mrs. Westmore's toilet--had replaced the dark-eyed attendant of the day before; and supposing that the latter was temporarily off duty, he asked Mrs. Ogan if she might be seen.

The matron's face was a picture of genteel perplexity. "The other nurse? Our regular surgical nurse, Miss Golden, is ill--Miss Hibbs, here, is replacing her for the present." She indicated the gaping damsel; then, as Amherst persisted: "Ah," she wondered negligently, "do you mean the young lady you saw here yesterday? Certainly--I had forgotten: Miss Brent was merely a--er--temporary substitute. I believe she was recommended to Dr. Disbrow by one of his patients; but we found her quite unsuitable--in fact, unfitted--and the doctor discharged her this morning."

Mrs. Westmore had drawn near, and while the matron delivered her explanation, with an uneasy sorting and shifting of words, a quick signal of intelligence passed between her hearers. "You see?" Amherst's eyes exclaimed; "I see--they have sent her away because she told you,"