The Fruit of the Tree | Page 7

Amherst; and their apparent inevitableness mocked the hopes he had
based on Mrs. Westmore's arrival.
"Where every stone is piled on another, through the whole stupid
structure of selfishness and egotism, how can one be pulled out without
making the whole thing topple? And whatever they're blind to, they
always see that," he mused, reaching up for the strap of the car.
He walked a few yards beyond the manager's house, and turned down a
side street lined with scattered cottages. Approaching one of these by a
gravelled path he pushed open the door, and entered a sitting-room
where a green-shaded lamp shone pleasantly on bookshelves and a
crowded writing-table.
A brisk little woman in black, laying down the evening paper as she
rose, lifted her hands to his tall shoulders.
"Well, mother," he said, stooping to her kiss.
"You're late, John," she smiled back at him, not reproachfully, but with
affection.
She was a wonderfully compact and active creature, with face so young
and hair so 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.