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

to check an exclamation. "Say I'll come as soon as I've had supper," he said.

The boy vanished, and Amherst turned back to the sitting-room. "Truscomb's ill--he has sent for me; and I saw Mrs. Westmore arriving tonight! Have supper, mother--we won't wait for Duplain." His face still glowed with excitement, and his eyes were dark with the concentration of his inward vision.

"Oh, John, John!" Mrs. Amherst sighed, crossing the passage to the kitchen.


III

AT the manager's door Amherst was met by Mrs. Truscomb, a large flushed woman in a soiled wrapper and diamond earrings.

"Mr. Truscomb's very sick. He ought not to see you. The doctor thinks--" she began.

Dr. Disbrow, at this point, emerged from the sitting-room. He was a pale man, with a beard of mixed grey-and-drab, and a voice of the same indeterminate quality.

"Good evening, Mr. Amherst. Truscomb is pretty poorly--on the edge of pneumonia, I'm afraid. As he seems anxious to see you I think you'd better go up for two minutes--not more, please." He paused, and went on with a smile: "You won't excite him, of course--nothing unpleasant----"

"He's worried himself sick over that wretched Dillon," Mrs. Truscomb interposed, draping her wrapper majestically about an indignant bosom.

"That's it--puts too much heart into his work. But we'll have Dillon all right before long," the physician genially declared.

Mrs. Truscomb, with a reluctant gesture, led Amherst up the handsomely carpeted stairs to the room where her husband lay, a prey to the cares of office. She ushered the young man in, and withdrew to the next room, where he heard her coughing at intervals, as if to remind him that he was under observation.

The manager of the Westmore mills was not the type of man that Amherst's comments on his superior suggested. As he sat propped against the pillows, with a brick-red flush on his cheek-bones, he seemed at first glance to belong to the innumerable army of American business men--the sallow, undersized, lacklustre drudges who have never lifted their heads from the ledger. Even his eye, now bright with fever, was dull and non-committal in daily life; and perhaps only the ramifications of his wrinkles could have revealed what particular ambitions had seamed his soul.

"Good evening, Amherst. I'm down with a confounded cold."

"I'm sorry to hear it," the young man forced himself to say.

"Can't get my breath--that's the trouble." Truscomb paused and gasped. "I've just heard that Mrs. Westmore is here--and I want you to go round--tomorrow morning--" He had to break off once more.

"Yes, sir," said Amherst, his heart leaping.

"Needn't see her--ask for her father, Mr. Langhope. Tell him what the doctor says--I'll be on my legs in a day or two--ask 'em to wait till I can take 'em over the mills."

He shot one of his fugitive glances at his assistant, and held up a bony hand. "Wait a minute. On your way there, stop and notify Mr. Gaines. He was to meet them here. You understand?"

"Yes, sir," said Amherst; and at that moment Mrs. Truscomb appeared on the threshold.

"I must ask you to come now, Mr. Amherst," she began haughtily; but a glance from her husband reduced her to a heaving pink nonentity.

"Hold on, Amherst. I hear you've been in to Hanaford. Did you go to the hospital?"

"Ezra--" his wife murmured: he looked through her.

"Yes," said Amherst.

Truscomb's face seemed to grow smaller and dryer. He transferred his look from his wife to his assistant.

"All right. You'll just bear in mind that it's Disbrow's business to report Dillon's case to Mrs. Westmore? You're to confine yourself to my message. Is that clear?"

"Perfectly clear. Goodnight," Amherst answered, as he turned to follow Mrs. Truscomb.

* * * * *

That same evening, four persons were seated under the bronze chandelier in the red satin drawing-room of the Westmore mansion. One of the four, the young lady in widow's weeds whose face had arrested Miss Brent's attention that afternoon, rose from a massively upholstered sofa and drifted over to the fireplace near which her father sat.

"Didn't I tell you it was awful, father?" she sighed, leaning despondently against the high carved mantelpiece surmounted by a bronze clock in the form of an obelisk.

Mr. Langhope, who sat smoking, with one faultlessly-clad leg crossed on the other, and his ebony stick reposing against the arm of his chair, raised his clear ironical eyes to her face.

"As an archæologist," he said, with a comprehensive wave of his hand, "I find it positively interesting. I should really like to come here and dig."

There were no lamps in the room, and the numerous gas-jets of the chandelier shed their lights impartially on ponderously framed canvases of the Bay of Naples and the Hudson in Autumn, on Carrara busts and bronze Indians on velvet pedestals.

"All this," murmured Mr. Langhope, "is getting to be as rare as the giant sequoias. In another fifty years we shall have collectors fighting for that Bay of Naples."

Bessy Westmore turned from him impatiently. When she felt deeply on any subject her father's flippancy annoyed her.

"_You_ can see, Maria," she said, seating herself beside the other lady of the party, "why I couldn't possibly live here."

Mrs. Eustace Ansell, immediately after dinner, had bent her slender back above the velvet-covered writing-table, where an inkstand of Vienna ormolu offered its empty cup to her pen. Being habitually charged with a voluminous correspondence, she had foreseen this contingency and met it by despatching her maid for her own writing-case, which was now outspread before her in all its complex neatness; but at Bessy's appeal she wiped her pen, and turned a sympathetic gaze on her companion.

Mrs. Ansell's face drew all its charm from its adaptability. It was a different face to each speaker: now kindling with irony, now gently maternal, now charged with abstract meditation--and few paused to reflect that, in each case, it was merely the mirror held up to some one else's view of life.

"It needs doing over," she admitted, following the widow's melancholy glance about the room. "But you are a spoilt child to complain. Think of having a house of your own to come to, instead of having to put up at the Hanaford hotel!"

Mrs. Westmore's attention was arrested by the first part of the reply.

"Doing over? Why in the world should I do it over? No one could expect me to come here _now_--could they, Mr. Tredegar?" she exclaimed, transferring her appeal to the fourth member of the party.

Mr. Tredegar, the family lawyer, who had deemed it his duty to accompany the widow on her visit of inspection, was strolling up and down the room with short pompous steps, a cigar between his lips, and his arms behind him. He cocked his sparrow-like head, scanned the offending apartment, and terminated his survey by resting his eyes on Mrs. Westmore's charming petulant face.

"It all depends," he replied axiomatically, "how large an income you require."

Mr. Tredegar uttered this remark with the air of one who pronounces on an important point in law: his lightest observation seemed a decision handed down from the bench to which he had never ascended. He restored the cigar to his lips, and sought approval in Mrs. Ansell's expressive eye.

"Ah, that's it, Bessy. You've that to remember," the older lady murmured, as if struck by the profundity of the remark.

Mrs. Westmore made an impatient gesture. "We've always had money enough--Dick was perfectly satisfied." Her voice trembled a little on her husband's name. "And you don't know what the place is like by daylight--and the people who come to call!"

"Of course you needn't see any one now, dear," Mrs. Ansell reminded her, "except the Halford Gaineses."

"I am sure they're bad enough. Juliana Gaines will say: 'My dear, is that the way widows' veils are worn in New York this autumn?' and Halford will insist on our going to one of those awful family dinners, all Madeira and terrapin."

"It's too early for terrapin," Mrs. Ansell smiled consolingly; but Bessy had reverted to her argument. "Besides, what difference would my coming here make? I shall never understand anything about business," she declared.

Mr. Tredegar pondered, and once more removed his cigar. "The necessity has never arisen. But now that you find yourself in almost sole control of a large property----"

Mr. Langhope laughed gently. "Apply yourself, Bessy. Bring your masterly intellect to bear on the industrial problem."

Mrs. Ansell restored the innumerable implements to her writing-case, and laid her arm with a caressing gesture on Mrs. Westmore's shoulder. "Don't tease her. She's tired, and she misses the baby."

"I shall get a telegram tomorrow morning," exclaimed the young mother, brightening.

"Of course you will. 'Cicely has just eaten two boiled eggs and a bowl of porridge, and is bearing up wonderfully.'"

She drew Mrs. Westmore persuasively to her feet, but the widow refused to relinquish her hold on her grievance.

"You all think I'm extravagant and careless about money," she broke out, addressing the room in general from the shelter of Mrs. Ansell's embrace; "but I know one thing: If I had my way I should begin to economize by selling this horrible house, instead of leaving it shut up from one year's end to another."

Her father looked up: proposals of retrenchment always struck him as business-like when they did not affect his own expenditure. "What do you think of that, eh, Tredegar?"

The eminent lawyer drew in his thin lips. "From the point of view of policy, I think unfavourably of it," he pronounced.

Bessy's face clouded, and Mrs. Ansell argued gently: "Really, it's too late to look so far into the future. Remember, my dear, that we are due at the mills tomorrow at ten."

The reminder that she must rise early had the effect of hastening Mrs. Westmore's withdrawal, and the two ladies, after an exchange of goodnights, left the men to their cigars.

Mr. Langhope was the first to speak.

"Bessy's as hopelessly vague about business as I am, Tredegar. Why the deuce Westmore left her everything outright--but he was only a heedless boy himself."

"Yes. The way he allowed things to go, it's a wonder there was anything to leave. This Truscomb must be an able fellow."

"Devoted to Dick's interests, I've always understood."

"He makes the mills pay well, at any rate, and that's not so easy nowadays. But on general principles it's as well he should see that we mean to look into everything thoroughly. Of course Halford Gaines will never be more than a good figure-head, but Truscomb must be made to understand that Mrs. Westmore intends to interest herself personally in the business."

"Oh, by all means--of course--" Mr. Langhope assented, his light smile stiffening into a yawn at the mere suggestion.

He rose with an effort, supporting himself on his stick. "I think I'll turn in myself. There's not a readable book in that God-forsaken library, and I believe Maria Ansell has gone off with my volume of Loti."

* * * * *

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