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

autumn evening which had witnessed their first broken exchange of confidences; and he was struck once more with the change that feeling produced in her. Emotions flashed across her face like the sweep of sun-rent clouds over a quiet landscape, bringing out the gleam of hidden waters, the fervour of smouldering colours, all the subtle delicacies of modelling that are lost under the light of an open sky. And it was extraordinary how she could infuse into a principle the warmth and colour of a passion! If conduct, to most people, seemed a cold matter of social prudence or inherited habit, to her it was always the newly-discovered question of her own relation to life--as most women see the great issues only through their own wants and prejudices, so she seemed always to see her personal desires in the light of the larger claims.

"But I don't think," Amherst went on, "that anything can be said to convince me that I ought to alter my decision. These months of idleness have shown me that I'm one of the members of society who are a danger to the community if their noses are not kept to the grindstone----"

Justine lowered her eyes musingly, and he saw she was undergoing the reaction of constraint which always followed on her bursts of unpremeditated frankness.

"That is not for me to judge," she answered after a moment. "But if you decide to go away for a time--surely it ought to be in such a way that your going does not seem to cast any reflection on Bessy, or subject her to any unkind criticism."

Amherst, reddening slightly, glanced at her in surprise. "I don't think you need fear that--I shall be the only one criticized," he said drily.

"Are you sure--if you take such a position as you spoke of? So few people understand the love of hard work for its own sake. They will say that your quarrel with your wife has driven you to support yourself--and that will be cruel to Bessy."

Amherst shrugged his shoulders. "They'll be more likely to say I tried to play the gentleman and failed, and wasn't happy till I got back to my own place in life--which is true enough," he added with a touch of irony.

"They may say that too; but they will make Bessy suffer first--and it will be your fault if she is humiliated in that way. If you decide to take up your factory work for a time, can't you do so without--without accepting a salary? Oh, you see I stick at nothing," she broke in upon herself with a laugh, "and Bessy has said things which make me see that she would suffer horribly if--if you put such a slight on her." He remained silent, and she went on urgently: "From Bessy's standpoint it would mean a decisive break--the repudiating of your whole past. And it is a question on which you can afford to be generous, because I know...I think...it's less important in your eyes than hers...."

Amherst glanced at her quickly. "That particular form of indebtedness, you mean?"

She smiled. "The easiest to cancel, and therefore the least galling; isn't that the way you regard it?"

"I used to--yes; but--" He was about to add: "No one at Lynbrook does," but the flash of intelligence in her eyes restrained him, while at the same time it seemed to answer: "There's my point! To see their limitation is to allow for it, since every enlightenment brings a corresponding obligation."

She made no attempt to put into words the argument her look conveyed, but rose from her seat with a rapid glance at her watch.

"And now I must go, or I shall miss my train." She held out her hand, and as Amherst's met it, he said in a low tone, as if in reply to her unspoken appeal: "I shall remember all you have said."

* * * * *

It was a new experience for Amherst to be acting under the pressure of another will; but during his return journey to Lynbrook that afternoon it was pure relief to surrender himself to this pressure, and the surrender brought not a sense of weakness but of recovered energy. It was not in his nature to analyze his motives, or spend his strength in weighing closely balanced alternatives of conduct; and though, during the last purposeless months, he had grown to brood over every spring of action in himself and others, this tendency disappeared at once in contact with the deed to be done. It was as though a tributary stream, gathering its crystal speed among the hills, had been suddenly poured into the stagnant waters of his will; and he saw now how thick and turbid those waters had become--how full of the slime-bred life that chokes the springs of courage.

His whole desire now was to be generous to his wife: to bear the full brunt of whatever pain their parting brought. Justine had said that Bessy seemed nervous and unhappy: it was clear, therefore, that she also had suffered from the wounds they had dealt each other, though she kept her unmoved front to the last. Poor child! Perhaps that insensible exterior was the only way she knew of expressing courage! It seemed to Amherst that all means of manifesting the finer impulses must slowly wither in the Lynbrook air. As he approached his destination, his thoughts of her were all pitiful: nothing remained of the personal resentment which had debased their parting. He had telephoned from town to announce the hour of his return, and when he emerged from the station he half-expected to find her seated in the brougham whose lamps signalled him through the early dusk. It would be like her to undergo such a reaction of feeling, and to express it, not in words, but by taking up their relation as if there had been no break in it. He had once condemned this facility of renewal as a sign of lightness, a result of that continual evasion of serious issues which made the life of Bessy's world a thin crust of custom above a void of thought. But he now saw that, if she was the product of her environment, that constituted but another claim on his charity, and made the more precious any impulses of natural feeling that had survived the unifying pressure of her life. As he approached the brougham, he murmured mentally: "What if I were to try once more?"

Bessy had not come to meet him; but he said to himself that he should find her alone at the house, and that he would make his confession at once. As the carriage passed between the lights on the tall stone gate-posts, and rolled through the bare shrubberies of the avenue, he felt a momentary tightening of the heart--a sense of stepping back into the trap from which he had just wrenched himself free--a premonition of the way in which the smooth systematized routine of his wife's existence might draw him back into its revolutions as he had once seen a careless factory hand seized and dragged into a flying belt....

But it was only for a moment; then his thoughts reverted to Bessy. It was she who was to be considered--this time he must be strong enough for both.

The butler met him on the threshold, flanked by the usual array of footmen; and as he saw his portmanteau ceremoniously passed from hand to hand, Amherst once more felt the steel of the springe on his neck.

"Is Mrs. Amherst in the drawing-room, Knowles?" he asked.

"No, sir," said Knowles, who had too high a sense of fitness to volunteer any information beyond the immediate fact required of him.

"She has gone up to her sitting-room, then?" Amherst continued, turning toward the broad sweep of the stairway.

"No, sir," said the butler slowly; "Mrs. Amherst has gone away."

"Gone away?" Amherst stopped short, staring blankly at the man's smooth official mask.

"This afternoon, sir; to Mapleside."

"To Mapleside?"

"Yes, sir, by motor--to stay with Mrs. Carbury."

There was a moment's silence. It had all happened so quickly that Amherst, with the dual vision which comes at such moments, noticed that the third footman--or was it the fourth?--was just passing his portmanteau on to a shirt-sleeved arm behind the door which led to the servant's wing....

He roused himself to look at the tall clock. It was just six. He had telephoned from town at two.

"At what time did Mrs. Amherst leave?"

The butler meditated. "Sharp at four, sir. The maid took the three-forty with the luggage."

With the luggage! So it was not a mere one-night visit. The blood rose slowly to Amherst's face. The footmen had disappeared, but presently the door at the back of the hall reopened, and one of them came out, carrying an elaborately-appointed tea-tray toward the smoking-room. The routine of the house was going on as if nothing had happened.... The butler looked at Amherst with respectful--too respectful--interrogation, and he was suddenly conscious that he was standing motionless in the middle of the hall, with one last intolerable question on his lips.

Well--it had to be spoken! "Did Mrs. Amherst receive my telephone message?"

"Yes, sir. I gave it to her myself."

It occurred confusedly to Amherst that a well-bred man--as Lynbrook understood the phrase--would, at this point, have made some tardy feint of being in his wife's confidence, of having, on second thoughts, no reason to be surprised at her departure. It was humiliating, he supposed, to be thus laying bare his discomfiture to his dependents--he could see that even Knowles was affected by the manifest impropriety of the situation--but no pretext presented itself to his mind, and after another interval of silence he turned slowly toward the door of the smoking-room.

"My letters are here, I suppose?" he paused on the threshold to enquire; and on the butler's answering in the affirmative, he said to himself, with a last effort to suspend his judgment: "She has left a line--there will be some explanation----"

But there was nothing--neither word nor message; nothing but the reverberating retort of her departure in the face of his return--her flight to Blanche Carbury as the final answer to his final appeal.


XXIII

JUSTINE was coming back to Lynbrook. She had been, after all, unable to stay out the ten days of her visit: the undefinable sense of being needed, so often the determining motive of her actions, drew her back to Long Island at the end of the week. She had received no word from Amherst or Bessy; only Cicely had told her, in a big round hand, that mother had been away three days, and that it had been very lonely, and that the housekeeper's cat had kittens, and she was to have one; and were kittens christened, or how did they get their names?--because she wanted to call hers Justine; and she had found in her book a bird like the one father had shown them in the swamp; and they were not alone now, because the Telfers were there, and they had all been out sleighing; but it would be much nicer when Justine came back....

It was as difficult to extract any sequence of facts from Cicely's letter as from an early chronicle. She made no reference to Amherst's return, which was odd, since she was fond of her step-father, yet not significant, since the fact of