The Fruit of the Tree - Edith Wharton (reading well txt) 📗

recklessly to a girl with exceptional eyes, it was rather upsetting to discover in those eyes no consciousness of the risk he had taken!

"But I _am_ rather tired of it now," she continued, and his look grew guarded again. After all, they were all the same--except in that particular matter of the eyes. At the thought, he risked another look, hung on the sharp edge of betrayal, and was snatched back, not by the manly instinct of self-preservation, but by some imp of mockery lurking in the depths that lured him.

He recovered his balance and took refuge in a tone of worldly ease. "I saw a chap the other day who said he knew you when you were at Saint Elizabeth's--wasn't that the name of your hospital?"

Justine assented. "One of the doctors, I suppose. Where did you meet him?"

Ah, _now_ she should see! He summoned his utmost carelessness of tone. "Down on Long Island last week--I was spending Sunday with the Amhersts." He held up the glittering fact to her, and watched for the least little blink of awe; but her lids never trembled. It was a confession of social blindness which painfully negatived Mrs. Dressel's hint that she knew the Amhersts; if she had even known _of_ them, she could not so fatally have missed his point.

"Long Island?" She drew her brows together in puzzled retrospection. "I wonder if it could have been Stephen Wyant? I heard he had taken over his uncle's practice somewhere near New York."

"Wyant--that's the name. He's the doctor at Clifton, the nearest town to the Amhersts' place. Little Cicely had a cold--Cicely Westmore, you know--a small cousin of mine, by the way--" he switched a rose-branch loftily out of her path, explaining, as she moved on, that Cicely was the daughter of Mrs. Amherst's first marriage to Richard Westmore. "That's the way I happened to see this Dr. Wyant. Bessy--Mrs. Amherst--asked him to stop to luncheon, after he'd seen the kid. He seems rather a discontented sort of a chap--grumbling at not having a New York practice. I should have thought he had rather a snug berth, down there at Lynbrook, with all those swells to dose."

Justine smiled. "Dr. Wyant is ambitious, and swells don't have as interesting diseases as poor people. One gets tired of giving them bread pills for imaginary ailments. But Dr. Wyant is not strong himself and I fancy a country practice is better for him than hard work in town."

"You think him clever though, do you?" Westy enquired absently. He was already bored with the subject of the Long Island doctor, and vexed at the lack of perception that led his companion to show more concern in the fortunes of a country practitioner than in the fact of his own visit to the Amhersts; but the topic was a safe one, and it was agreeable to see how her face kindled when she was interested.

Justine mused on his question. "I think he has very great promise--which he is almost certain not to fulfill," she answered with a sigh which seemed to Westy's anxious ear to betray a more than professional interest in the person referred to.

"Oh, come now--why not? With the Amhersts to give him a start--I heard my cousin recommending him to a lot of people the other day----"

"Oh, he may become a fashionable doctor," Justine assented indifferently; to which her companion rejoined, with a puzzled stare: "That's just what I mean--with Bessy backing him!"

"Has Mrs. Amherst become such a power, then?" Justine asked, taking up the coveted theme just as he despaired of attracting her to it.

"My cousin?" he stretched the two syllables to the cracking-point. "Well, she's awfully rich, you know; and there's nobody smarter. Don't you think so?"

"I don't know; it's so long since I've seen her."

He brightened. "You _did_ know her, then?" But the discovery made her obtuseness the more inexplicable!

"Oh, centuries ago: in another world."

"_Centuries_--I like that!" Westy gallantly protested, his ardour kindling as she swam once more within his social ken. "And Amherst? You know him too, I suppose? By Jove, here he is now----"

He signalled a tall figure strolling slowly toward them with bent head and brooding gaze. Justine's eye had retained a vivid image of the man with whom, scarcely three years earlier, she had lived through a moment of such poignant intimacy, and she recognized at once his lean outline, and the keen spring of his features, still veiled by the same look of inward absorption. She noticed, as he raised his hat in response to Westy Gaines's greeting, that the vertical lines between his brows had deepened; and a moment later she was aware that this change was the visible token of others which went deeper than the fact of his good clothes and his general air of leisure and well-being--changes perceptible to her only in the startled sense of how prosperity had aged him.

"Hallo, Amherst--trying to get under cover?" Westy jovially accosted him, with a significant gesture toward the crowded lawn from which the new-comer had evidently fled. "I was just telling Miss Brent that this is the safest place on these painful occasions--Oh, confound it, it's not as safe as I thought! Here's one of my sisters making for me!"

There ensued a short conflict of words, before his feeble flutter of resistance was borne down by a resolute Miss Gaines who, as she swept him back to the marquee, cried out to Amherst that her mother was asking for him too; and then Justine had time to observe that her remaining companion had no intention of responding to his hostess's appeal.

Westy, in naming her, had laid just enough stress on the name to let it serve as a reminder or an introduction, as circumstances might decide, and she saw that Amherst, roused from his abstraction by the proffered clue, was holding his hand out doubtfully.

"I think we haven't met for some years," he said.

Justine smiled. "I have a better reason than you for remembering the exact date;" and in response to his look of surprise she added: "You made me commit a professional breach of faith, and I've never known since whether to be glad or sorry."

Amherst still bent on her the gaze which seemed to find in external details an obstacle rather than a help to recognition; but suddenly his face cleared. "It was you who told me the truth about poor Dillon! I couldn't imagine why I seemed to see you in such a different setting...."

"Oh, I'm disguised as a lady this afternoon," she said smiling. "But I'm glad you saw through the disguise."

He smiled back at her. "Are you? Why?"

"It seems to make it--if it's so transparent--less of a sham, less of a dishonesty," she began impulsively, and then paused again, a little annoyed at the overemphasis of her words. Why was she explaining and excusing herself to this stranger? Did she propose to tell him next that she had borrowed her dress from Effie Dressel? To cover her confusion she went on with a slight laugh: "But you haven't told me."

"What was I to tell you?"

"Whether to be glad or sorry that I broke my vow and told the truth about Dillon."

They were standing face to face in the solitude of the garden-walk, forgetful of everything but the sudden surprised sense of intimacy that had marked their former brief communion. Justine had raised her eyes half-laughingly to Amherst, but they dropped before the unexpected seriousness of his.

"Why do you want to know?" he asked.

She made an effort to sustain the note of pleasantry.

"Well--it might, for instance, determine my future conduct. You see I'm still a nurse, and such problems are always likely to present themselves."

"Ah, then don't!"

"Don't?"

"I mean--" He hesitated a moment, reaching up to break a rose from the branch that tapped his shoulder. "I was only thinking what risks we run when we scramble into the chariot of the gods and try to do the driving. Be passive--be passive, and you'll be happier!"

"Oh, as to that--!" She swept it aside with one of her airy motions. "But Dillon, for instance--would _he_ have been happier if I'd been passive?"

Amherst seemed to ponder. "There again--how can one tell?"

"And the risk's not worth taking?"

"No!"

She paused, and they looked at each other again. "Do you mean that seriously, I wonder? Do you----"

"Act on it myself? God forbid! The gods drive so badly. There's poor Dillon...he happened to be in their way...as we all are at times." He pulled himself up, and went on in a matter-of-fact tone: "In Dillon's case, however, my axioms don't apply. When my wife heard the truth she was, of course, immensely kind to him; and if it hadn't been for you she might never have known."

Justine smiled. "I think you would have found out--I was only the humble instrument. But now--" she hesitated--"now you must be able to do so much--"

Amherst lifted his head, and she saw the colour rise under his fair skin. "Out at Westmore? You've never been there since? Yes--my wife has made some changes; but it's all so problematic--and one would have to live here...."

"You don't, then?"

He answered by an imperceptible shrug. "Of course I'm here often; and she comes now and then. But the journey's tiresome, and it is not always easy for her to get away." He checked himself, and Justine saw that he, in turn, was suddenly conscious of the incongruity of explaining and extenuating his personal situation to a stranger. "But then we're _not_ strangers!" a voice in her exulted, just as he added, with an embarrassed attempt to efface and yet justify his moment of expansion: "That reminds me--I think you know my wife. I heard her asking Mrs. Dressel about you. She wants so much to see you."

The transition had been effected, at the expense of dramatic interest, but to the obvious triumph of social observances; and to Justine, after all, regaining at his side the group about the marquee, the interest was not so much diminished as shifted to the no less suggestive problem of studying the friend of her youth in the unexpected character of John Amherst's wife.

Meanwhile, however, during the brief transit across the Gaines greensward, her thoughts were still busy with Amherst. She had seen at once that the peculiar sense of intimacy reawakened by their meeting had been chilled and deflected by her first allusion to the topic which had previously brought them together: Amherst had drawn back as soon as she named the mills. What could be the cause of his reluctance? When they had last met, the subject burned within him: her being in actual fact a stranger had not, then, been an obstacle to his confidences. Now that he was master at Westmore it was plain that another tone became him--that his situation necessitated a greater reserve; but her enquiry did not imply the least wish to overstep this restriction: it merely showed her remembrance of his frankly-avowed interest in the operatives. Justine was struck by the fact that so natural an allusion should put him on the defensive. She did not for a moment believe that he had lost his interest in the mills; and that his point of view should have shifted with the fact of ownership she rejected as an equally superficial reading of his character. The man with whom she had talked at Dillon's bedside was one in whom the ruling