The Fruit of the Tree | Page 7

white that she looked as unreal as a stage mother till a close view revealed the fine lines that experience had drawn about her mouth and eyes. The eyes themselves, brightly black and glancing, had none of the veiled depths of her son's gaze. Their look was outward, on a world which had dealt her hard blows and few favours, but in which her interest was still fresh, amused and unabated.
Amherst glanced at his watch. "Never mind--Duplain will be later still. I had to go into Hanaford, and he is replacing me at the office."
"So much the better, dear: we can have a minute to ourselves. Sit down and tell me what kept you."
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