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

exacted that she should be spared all fatigue and worry; and after the baby's death Amherst had felt with her too tenderly to venture an immediate return to unwelcome questions.

For by this time it had become clear to him that such questions were, and always would be, unwelcome to her. As the easiest means of escaping them, she had once more dismissed the whole problem to the vague and tiresome sphere of "business," whence he had succeeded in detaching it for a moment in the early days of their union. Her first husband--poor unappreciated Westmore!--had always spared her the boredom of "business," and Halford Gaines and Mr. Tredegar were ready to show her the same consideration; it was part of the modern code of chivalry that lovely woman should not be bothered about ways and means. But Bessy was too much the wife--and the wife in love--to consent that her husband's views on the management of the mills should be totally disregarded. Precisely because her advisers looked unfavourably on his intervention, she felt bound--if only in defense of her illusions--to maintain and emphasize it. The mills were, in fact, the official "platform" on which she had married: Amherst's devoted _rôle_ at Westmore had justified the unconventionality of the step. And so she was committed--the more helplessly for her dense misintelligence of both sides of the question--to the policy of conciliating the opposing influences which had so uncomfortably chosen to fight out their case on the field of her poor little existence: theoretically siding with her husband, but surreptitiously, as he well knew, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, who were really defending her own cause.

All this Amherst saw with that cruel insight which had replaced his former blindness. He was, in truth, more ashamed of the insight than of the blindness: it seemed to him horribly cold-blooded to be thus analyzing, after two years of marriage, the source of his wife's inconsistencies. And, partly for this reason, he had put off from month to month the final question of the future management of the mills, and of the radical changes to be made there if his system were to prevail. But the time had come when, if Bessy had to turn to Westmore for the justification of her marriage, he had even more need of calling upon it for the same service. He had not, assuredly, married her because of Westmore; but he would scarcely have contemplated marriage with a rich woman unless the source of her wealth had offered him some such opportunity as Westmore presented. His special training, and the natural bent of his mind, qualified him, in what had once seemed a predestined manner, to help Bessy to use her power nobly, for her own uplifting as well as for that of Westmore; and so the mills became, incongruously enough, the plank of safety to which both clung in their sense of impending disaster.

It was not that Amherst feared the temptation to idleness if this outlet for his activity were cut off. He had long since found that the luxury with which his wife surrounded him merely quickened his natural bent for hard work and hard fare. He recalled with a touch of bitterness how he had once regretted having separated himself from his mother's class, and how seductive for a moment, to both mind and senses, that other life had appeared. Well--he knew it now, and it had neither charm nor peril for him. Capua must have been a dull place to one who had once drunk the joy of battle. What he dreaded was not that he should learn to love the life of ease, but that he should grow to loathe it uncontrollably, as the symbol of his mental and spiritual bondage. And Westmore was his safety-valve, his refuge--if he were cut off from Westmore what remained to him? It was not only the work he had found to his hand, but the one work for which his hand was fitted. It was his life that he was fighting for in insisting that now at last, before the close of this long-deferred visit to Hanaford, the question of the mills should be faced and settled. He had made that clear to Bessy, in a scene he still shrank from recalling; for it was of the essence of his somewhat unbending integrity that he would not trick her into a confused surrender to the personal influence he still possessed over her, but must seek to convince her by the tedious process of argument and exposition, against which she knew no defense but tears and petulance. But he had, at any rate, gained her consent to his setting forth his views at the meeting of directors the next morning; and meanwhile he had meant to be extraordinarily patient and reasonable with her, till the hint of Mrs. Ansell's stratagem produced in him a fresh reaction of distrust.


XII

THAT evening when dinner ended, Mrs. Ansell, with a glance through the tall dining-room windows, had suggested to Bessy that it would be pleasanter to take coffee on the verandah; but Amherst detained his wife with a glance.

"I should like Bessy to stay," he said.

The dining-room being on the cool side the house, with a refreshing outlook on the garden, the men preferred to smoke there rather than in the stuffily-draped Oriental apartment destined to such rites; and Bessy Amherst, with a faint sigh, sank back into her seat, while Mrs. Ansell drifted out through one of the open windows.

The men surrounding Richard Westmore's table were the same who nearly three years earlier had gathered in his house for the same purpose: the discussion of conditions at the mills. The only perceptible change in the relation to each other of the persons composing this group was that John Amherst was now the host of the other two, instead of being a subordinate called in for cross-examination; but he was so indifferent, or at least so heedless, a host--so forgetful, for instance, of Mr. Tredegar's preference for a "light" cigar, and of Mr. Langhope's feelings on the duty of making the Westmore madeira circulate with the sun--that the change was manifest only in his evening-dress, and in the fact of his sitting at the foot of the table.

If Amherst was conscious of the contrast thus implied, it was only as a restriction on his freedom. As far as the welfare of Westmore was concerned he would rather have stood before his companions as the assistant manager of the mills than as the husband of their owner; and it seemed to him, as he looked back, that he had done very little with the opportunity which looked so great in the light of his present restrictions. What he _had_ done with it--the use to which, as unfriendly critics might insinuate, he had so adroitly put it--had landed him, ironically enough, in the ugly _impasse_ of a situation from which no issue seemed possible without some wasteful sacrifice of feeling.

His wife's feelings, for example, were already revealing themselves in an impatient play of her fan that made her father presently lean forward to suggest: "If we men are to talk shop, is it necessary to keep Bessy in this hot room?"

Amherst rose and opened the window behind his wife's chair.

"There's a breeze from the west--the room will be cooler now," he said, returning to his seat.

"Oh, I don't mind--" Bessy murmured, in a tone intended to give her companions the full measure of what she was being called on to endure.

Mr. Tredegar coughed slightly. "May I trouble you for that other box of cigars, Amherst? No, _not_ the Cabañas." Bessy rose and handed him the box on which his glance significantly rested. "Ah, thank you, my dear. I was about to ask," he continued, looking about for the cigar-lighter, which flamed unheeded at Amherst's elbow, "what special purpose will be served by a preliminary review of the questions to be discussed tomorrow."

"Ah--exactly," murmured Mr. Langhope. "The madeira, my dear John? No--ah--_please_--to the left!"

Amherst impatiently reversed the direction in which he had set the precious vessel moving, and turned to Mr. Tredegar, who was conspicuously lighting his cigar with a match extracted from his waist-coat pocket.

"The purpose is to define my position in the matter; and I prefer that Bessy should do this with your help rather than with mine."

Mr. Tredegar surveyed his cigar through drooping lids, as though the question propounded by Amherst were perched on its tip.

"Is not your position naturally involved in and defined by hers? You will excuse my saying that--technically speaking, of course--I cannot distinctly conceive of it as having any separate existence."

Mr. Tredegar spoke with the deliberate mildness that was regarded as his most effective weapon at the bar, since it was likely to abash those who were too intelligent to be propitiated by it.

"Certainly it is involved in hers," Amherst agreed; "but how far that defines it is just what I have waited till now to find out."

Bessy at this point recalled her presence by a restless turn of her graceful person, and her father, with an affectionate glance at her, interposed amicably: "But surely--according to old-fashioned ideas--it implies identity of interests?"

"Yes; but whose interests?" Amherst asked.

"Why--your wife's, man! She owns the mills."

Amherst hesitated. "I would rather talk of my wife's interest in the mills than of her interests there; but we'll keep to the plural if you prefer it. Personally, I believe the terms should be interchangeable in the conduct of such a business."

"Ah--I'm glad to hear that," said Mr. Tredegar quickly, "since it's precisely the view we all take."

Amherst's colour rose. "Definitions are ambiguous," he said. "Before you adopt mine, perhaps I had better develop it a little farther. What I mean is, that Bessy's interests in Westmore should be regulated by her interest in it--in its welfare as a social body, aside from its success as a commercial enterprise. If we agree on this definition, we are at one as to the other: namely that my relation to the matter is defined by hers."

He paused a moment, as if to give his wife time to contribute some sign of assent and encouragement; but she maintained a puzzled silence and he went on: "There is nothing new in this. I have tried to make Bessy understand from the beginning what obligations I thought the ownership of Westmore entailed, and how I hoped to help her fulfill them; but ever since our marriage all definite discussion of the subject has been put off for one cause or another, and that is my reason for urging that it should be brought up at the directors' meeting tomorrow."

There was another pause, during which Bessy glanced tentatively at Mr. Tredegar, and then said, with a lovely rise of colour: "But, John, I sometimes think you forget how much has been done at Westmore--the Mothers' Club, and the play-ground, and all--in the way of carrying out your ideas."

Mr. Tredegar discreetly dropped his glance to his cigar, and Mr. Langhope sounded an irrepressible note of approval and encouragement.

Amherst smiled. "No, I have not forgotten; and I am grateful to you for giving my ideas a trial. But what has been done hitherto is purely superficial." Bessy's eyes clouded, and he added hastily: "Don't think I undervalue it for that reason--heaven knows the surface of life needs improving! But it's like picking flowers and sticking them in the ground to make a garden--unless you transplant the flower with its roots, and prepare the soil to receive it, your garden will be faded tomorrow. No radical changes