The Fruit of the Tree. Edith Wharton

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      She picked up her knitting as she spoke, having the kind of hands that find repose in ceaseless small activities. Her son could not remember a time when he had not seen those small hands in motion—shaping garments, darning rents, repairing furniture, exploring the inner economy of clocks. "I make a sort of rag-carpet of the odd minutes," she had once explained to a friend who wondered at her turning to her needlework in the moment's interval between other tasks.

      Amherst threw himself wearily into a chair. "I was trying to find out something about Dillon's case," he said.

      His mother turned a quick glance toward the door, rose to close it, and reseated herself.

      "Well?"

      "I managed to have a talk with his nurse when she went off duty this evening."

      "The nurse? I wonder you could get her to speak."

      "Luckily she's not the regular incumbent, but a volunteer who happened to be here on a visit. As it was, I had some difficulty in making her talk—till I told her of Disbrow's letter."

      Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright glance from the needles. "He's very bad, then?"

      "Hopelessly maimed!"

      She shivered and cast down her eyes. "Do you suppose she really knows?"

      "She struck me as quite competent to judge."

      "A volunteer, you say, here on a visit? What is her name?"

      He raised his head with a vague look. "I never thought of asking her."

      Mrs. Amherst laughed. "How like you! Did she say with whom she was staying?"

      "I think she said in Oak Street—but she didn't mention any name."

      Mrs. Amherst wrinkled her brows thoughtfully. "I wonder if she's not the thin dark girl I saw the other day with Mrs. Harry Dressel. Was she tall and rather handsome?"

      "I don't know," murmured Amherst indifferently. As a rule he was humorously resigned to his mother's habit of deserting the general for the particular, and following some irrelevant thread of association in utter disregard of the main issue. But to-night, preoccupied with his subject, and incapable of conceiving how anyone else could be unaffected by it, he resented her indifference as a sign of incurable frivolity.

      "How she can live close to such suffering and forget it!" was his thought; then, with a movement of self-reproach, he remembered that the work flying through her fingers was to take shape as a garment for one of the infant Dillons. "She takes her pity out in action, like that quiet nurse, who was as cool as a drum-major till she took off her uniform—and then!" His face softened at the recollection of the girl's outbreak. Much as he admired, in theory, the woman who kept a calm exterior in emergencies, he had all a man's desire to know that the springs of feeling lay close to the unruffled surface.

      Mrs. Amherst had risen and crossed over to his chair. She leaned on it a moment, pushing the tossed brown hair from his forehead.

      "John, have you considered what you mean to do next?"

      He threw back his head to meet her gaze.

      "About this Dillon case," she continued. "How are all these investigations going to help you?"

      Their eyes rested on each other for a moment; then he said coldly: "You are afraid I am going to lose my place."

      She flushed like a girl and murmured: "It's not the kind of place I ever wanted to see you in!"

      "I know it," he returned in a gentler tone, clasping one of the hands on his chair-back. "I ought to have followed a profession, like my grandfather; but my father's blood was too strong in me. I should never have been content as anything but a working-man."

      "How can you call your father a working-man? He had a genius for mechanics, and if he had lived he would have been as great in his way as any statesman or lawyer."

      Amherst smiled. "Greater, to my thinking; but he gave me his hard-working hands without the genius to create with them. I wish I had inherited more from him, or less; but I must make the best of what I am, rather than try to be somebody else." He laid her hand caressingly against his cheek. "It's hard on you, mother—but you must bear with me."

      "I have never complained, John; but now you've chosen your work, it's natural that I should want you to stick to it."

      He rose with an impatient gesture. "Never fear; I could easily get another job——"

      "What? If Truscomb black-listed you? Do you forget that Scotch overseer who was here when we came?"

      "And whom Truscomb hounded out of the trade? I remember him," said Amherst grimly; "but I have an idea I am going to do the hounding this time."

      His mother sighed, but her reply was cut short by the noisy opening of the outer door. Amherst seemed to hear the sound with relief. "There's Duplain," he said, going into the passage; but on the threshold he encountered, not the young Alsatian overseer who boarded with them, but a small boy who said breathlessly: "Mr. Truscomb wants you to come down bimeby."

      "This evening? To the office?"

      "No—he's sick a-bed."

      The blood rushed to Amherst's face, and he had to press his lips close 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

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      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. СКАЧАТЬ