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

a wood-spirit who had absorbed into herself the last golden juices of the year.

She leaned back laughing against a tree-trunk, pelting Cicely with witch-hazel pods, making the terrier waltz for scraps of ginger-bread, and breaking off now and then to imitate, with her clear full notes, the call of some hidden marsh-bird, or the scolding chatter of a squirrel in the scrub-oaks.

"Is that what you'd like most about the journey--looking down the chimneys?" Amherst asked with a smile.

"Oh, I don't know--I should love it all! Think of the joy of skimming over half the earth--seeing it born again out of darkness every morning! Sometimes, when I've been up all night with a patient, and have seen the world _come back to me_ like that, I've been almost mad with its beauty; and then the thought that I've never seen more than a little corner of it makes me feel as if I were chained. But I think if I had wings I should choose to be a house-swallow; and then, after I'd had my fill of wonders, I should come back to my familiar corner, and my house full of busy humdrum people, and fly low to warn them of rain, and wheel up high to show them it was good haying weather, and know what was going on in every room in the house, and every house in the village; and all the while I should be hugging my wonderful big secret--the secret of snow-plains and burning deserts, and coral islands and buried cities--and should put it all into my chatter under the eaves, that the people in the house were always too busy to stop and listen to--and when winter came I'm sure I should hate to leave them, even to go back to my great Brazilian forests full of orchids and monkeys!"

"But, Justine, in winter you could take care of the monkeys," the practical Cicely suggested.

"Yes--and that would remind me of home!" Justine cried, swinging about to pinch the little girl's chin.

She was in one of the buoyant moods when the spirit of life caught her in its grip, and shook and tossed her on its mighty waves as a sea-bird is tossed through the spray of flying rollers. At such moments all the light and music of the world seemed distilled into her veins, and forced up in bubbles of laughter to her lips and eyes. Amherst had never seen her thus, and he watched her with the sense of relaxation which the contact of limpid gaiety brings to a mind obscured by failure and self-distrust. The world was not so dark a place after all, if such springs of merriment could well up in a heart as sensitive as hers to the burden and toil of existence.

"Isn't it strange," she went on with a sudden drop to gravity, "that the bird whose wings carry him farthest and show him the most wonderful things, is the one who always comes back to the eaves, and is happiest in the thick of everyday life?"

Her eyes met Amherst's. "It seems to me," he said, "that you're like that yourself--loving long flights, yet happiest in the thick of life."

She raised her dark brows laughingly. "So I imagine--but then you see I've never had the long flight!"

Amherst smiled. "Ah, there it is--one never knows--one never says, _This is the moment_! because, however good it is, it always seems the door to a better one beyond. Faust never said it till the end, when he'd nothing left of all he began by thinking worth while; and then, with what a difference it was said!"

She pondered. "Yes--but it _was_ the best, after all--the moment in which he had nothing left...."

"Oh," Cicely broke in suddenly, "do look at the squirrel up there! See, father--he's off! Let's follow him!"

As she crouched there, with head thrown back, and sparkling lips and eyes, her fair hair--of her mother's very hue--making a shining haze about her face, Amherst recalled the winter evening at Hopewood, when he and Bessy had tracked the grey squirrel under the snowy beeches. Scarcely three years ago--and how bitter memory had turned! A chilly cloud spread over his spirit, reducing everything once more to the leaden hue of reality....

"It's too late for any more adventures--we must be going," he said.


XX

AMHERST'S morning excursions with his step-daughter and Miss Brent renewed themselves more than once. He welcomed any pretext for escaping from the unprofitable round of his thoughts, and these woodland explorations, with their gay rivalry of search for some rare plant or elusive bird, and the contact with the child's happy wonder, and with the morning brightness of Justine's mood, gave him his only moments of self-forgetfulness.

But the first time that Cicely's chatter carried home an echo of their adventures, Amherst saw a cloud on his wife's face. Her resentment of Justine's influence over the child had long since subsided, and in the temporary absence of the governess she was glad to have Cicely amused; but she was never quite satisfied that those about her should have pursuits and diversions in which she did not share. Her jealousy did not concentrate itself on her husband and Miss Brent: Amherst had never shown any inclination for the society of other women, and if the possibility had been suggested to her, she would probably have said that Justine was not "in his style"--so unconscious is a pretty woman apt to be of the versatility of masculine tastes. But Amherst saw that she felt herself excluded from amusements in which she had no desire to join, and of which she consequently failed to see the purpose; and he gave up accompanying his stepdaughter.

Bessy, as if in acknowledgment of his renunciation, rose earlier in order to prolong their rides together. Dr. Wyant had counselled her against the fatigue of following the hounds, and she instinctively turned their horses away from the course the hunt was likely to take; but now and then the cry of the pack, or the flash of red on a distant slope, sent the blood to her face and made her press her mare to a gallop. When they escaped such encounters she showed no great zest in the exercise, and their rides resolved themselves into a spiritless middle-aged jog along the autumn lanes. In the early days of their marriage the joy of a canter side by side had merged them in a community of sensation beyond need of speech; but now that the physical spell had passed they felt the burden of a silence that neither knew how to break.

Once only, a moment's friction galvanized these lifeless rides. It was one morning when Bessy's wild mare Impulse, under-exercised and over-fed, suddenly broke from her control, and would have unseated her but for Amherst's grasp on the bridle.

"The horse is not fit for you to ride," he exclaimed, as the hot creature, with shudders of defiance rippling her flanks, lapsed into sullen subjection.

"It's only because I don't ride her enough," Bessy panted. "That new groom is ruining her mouth."

"You must not ride her alone, then."

"I shall not let that man ride her."

"I say you must not ride her alone."

"It's ridiculous to have a groom at one's heels!"

"Nevertheless you must, if you ride Impulse."

Their eyes met, and she quivered and yielded like the horse. "Oh, if you say so--" She always hugged his brief flashes of authority.

"I do say so. You promise me?"

"If you like----"

* * * * *

Amherst had made an attempt to occupy himself with the condition of Lynbrook, one of those slovenly villages, without individual character or the tradition of self-respect, which spring up in America on the skirts of the rich summer colonies. But Bessy had never given Lynbrook a thought, and he realized the futility of hoping to interest her in its mongrel population of day-labourers and publicans so soon after his glaring failure at Westmore. The sight of the village irritated him whenever he passed through the Lynbrook gates, but having perforce accepted the situation of prince consort, without voice in the government, he tried to put himself out of relation with all the questions which had hitherto engrossed him, and to see life simply as a spectator. He could even conceive that, under certain conditions, there might be compensations in the passive attitude; but unfortunately these conditions were not such as the life at Lynbrook presented.

The temporary cessation of Bessy's week-end parties had naturally not closed her doors to occasional visitors, and glimpses of the autumnal animation of Long Island passed now and then across the Amhersts' horizon. Blanche Carbury had installed herself at Mapleside, a fashionable colony half-way between Lynbrook and Clifton, and even Amherst, unused as he was to noting the seemingly inconsecutive movements of idle people, could not but remark that her visits to his wife almost invariably coincided with Ned Bowfort's cantering over unannounced from the Hunt Club, where he had taken up his autumn quarters.

There was something very likeable about Bowfort, to whom Amherst was attracted by the fact that he was one of the few men of Bessy's circle who knew what was going on in the outer world. Throughout an existence which one divined to have been both dependent and desultory, he had preserved a sense of wider relations and acquired a smattering of information to which he applied his only independent faculty, that of clear thought. He could talk intelligently and not too inaccurately of the larger questions which Lynbrook ignored, and a gay indifference to the importance of money seemed the crowning grace of his nature, till Amherst suddenly learned that this attitude of detachment was generally ascribed to the liberality of Mrs. Fenton Carbury. "Everybody knows she married Fenton to provide for Ned," some one let fall in the course of one of the smoking-room dissertations on which the host of Lynbrook had such difficulty in fixing his attention; and the speaker's matter-of-course tone, and the careless acquiescence of his hearers, were more offensive to Amherst than the fact itself. In the first flush of his disgust he classed the story as one of the lies bred in the malarious air of after-dinner gossip; but gradually he saw that, whether true or not, it had sufficient circulation to cast a shade of ambiguity on the persons concerned. Bessy alone seemed deaf to the rumours about her friend. There was something captivating to her in Mrs. Carbury's slang and noise, in her defiance of decorum and contempt of criticism. "I like Blanche because she doesn't pretend," was Bessy's vague justification of the lady; but in reality she was under the mysterious spell which such natures cast over the less venturesome imaginations of their own sex.

Amherst at first tried to deaden himself to the situation, as part of the larger coil of miseries in which he found himself; but all his traditions were against such tolerance, and they were roused to revolt by the receipt of a newspaper clipping, sent by an anonymous hand, enlarging on the fact that the clandestine meetings of a fashionable couple were being facilitated by the connivance of a Long Island _châtelaine_. Amherst, hot from the perusal of this paragraph, sprang into the first train, and laid the clipping before his father-in-law, who chanced to be passing through town on his way from the Hudson to the Hot Springs.

Mr. Langhope,