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

can tell him this."

"I?" exclaimed Justine, with a leap of colour to her pale cheeks.

Mrs. Ansell's eyes continued to avoid her. "My dear Miss Brent, Bessy has told me something of the wise counsels you have given her. Mr. Amherst is also your friend. As I said just now, you are the only person who might act as a link between them--surely you will not renounce the rôle."

Justine controlled herself. "My only rôle, as you call it, has been to urge Bessy to--to try to allow for her husband's views----"

"And have you not given the same advice to Mr. Amherst?"

The eyes of the two women met. "Yes," said Justine, after a moment.

"Then why refuse your help now? The moment is crucial."

Justine's thoughts had flown beyond the stage of resenting Mrs. Ansell's gentle pertinacity. All her faculties were absorbed in the question as to how she could most effectually use whatever influence she possessed.

"I put it to you as one old friend to another--will you write to Mr. Amherst to come back?" Mrs. Ansell urged her.

Justine was past considering even the strangeness of this request, and its oblique reflection on the kind of power ascribed to her. Through the confused beatings of her heart she merely struggled for a clearer sense of guidance.

"No," she said slowly. "I cannot."

"You cannot? With a friend's happiness in extremity?" Mrs. Ansell paused a moment before she added. "Unless you believe that Bessy would be happier divorced?"

"Divorced--? Oh, no," Justine shuddered.

"That is what it will come to."

"No, no! In time----"

"Time is what I am most afraid of, when Blanche Carbury disposes of it."

Justine breathed a deep sigh.

"You'll write?" Mrs. Ansell murmured, laying a soft touch on her hand.

"I have not the influence you think----"

"Can you do any harm by trying?"

"I might--" Justine faltered, losing her exact sense of the words she used.

"Ah," the other flashed back, "then you _have_ influence! Why will you not use it?"

Justine waited a moment; then her resolve gathered itself into words. "If I have any influence, I am not sure it would be well to use it as you suggest."

"Not to urge Mr. Amherst's return?"

"No--not now."

She caught the same veiled gleam of incredulity under Mrs. Ansell's lids--caught and disregarded it.

"It must be now or never," Mrs. Ansell insisted.

"I can't think so," Justine held out.

"Nevertheless--will you try?"

"No--no! It might be fatal."

"To whom?"

"To both." She considered. "If he came back now I know he would not stay."

Mrs. Ansell was upon her abruptly. "You _know_? Then you speak with authority?"

"No--what authority? I speak as I feel," Justine faltered.

The older woman drew herself to her feet. "Ah--then you shoulder a great responsibility!" She moved nearer to Justine, and once more laid a fugitive touch upon her. "You won't write to him?"

"No--no," the girl flung back; and the voices of the returning party in the hall made Mrs. Ansell, with an almost imperceptible gesture of warning, turn musingly away toward the fire.

* * * * *

Bessy came back brimming with the wonders she had seen. A glazed "sun-room," mosaic pavements, a marble fountain to feed the marble tank--and outside a water-garden, descending in successive terraces, to take up and utilize--one could see how practically!--the overflow from the tank. If one did the thing at all, why not do it decently? She had given up her new motor, had let her town house, had pinched and stinted herself in a hundred ways--if ever woman was entitled to a little compensating pleasure, surely she was that woman!

The days were crowded with consultations. Architect, contractors, engineers, a landscape gardener, and a dozen minor craftsmen, came and went, unrolled plans, moistened pencils, sketched, figured, argued, persuaded, and filled Bessy with the dread of appearing, under Blanche Carbury's eyes, subject to any restraining influences of economy. What! She was a young woman, with an independent fortune, and she was always wavering, considering, secretly referring back to the mute criticism of an invisible judge--of the husband who had been first to shake himself free of any mutual subjection? The accomplished Blanche did not have to say this--she conveyed it by the raising of painted brows, by a smile of mocking interrogation, a judiciously placed silence or a resigned glance at the architect. So the estimates poured in, were studied, resisted--then yielded to and signed; then the hour of advance payments struck, and an imperious appeal was despatched to Mr. Tredegar, to whom the management of Bessy's affairs had been transferred.

Mr. Tredegar, to his client's surprise, answered the appeal in person. He had not been lately to Lynbrook, dreading the cold and damp of the country in winter; and his sudden arrival had therefore an ominous significance.

He came for an evening in mid-week, when even Blanche Carbury was absent, and Bessy and Justine had the house to themselves. Mrs. Ansell had sailed the week before with her invalid cousin. No farther words had passed between herself and Justine--but the latter was conscious that their talk had increased instead of lessened the distance between them. Justine herself meant to leave soon. Her hope of regaining Bessy's confidence had been deceived, and seeing herself definitely superseded, she chafed anew at her purposeless inactivity. She had already written to one or two doctors in New York, and to the matron of Saint Elizabeth's. She had made herself a name in surgical cases, and it could not be long before a summons came....

Meanwhile Mr. Tredegar arrived, and the three dined together, the two women bending meekly to his discourse, which was never more oracular and authoritative than when delivered to the gentler sex alone. Amherst's absence, in particular, seemed to loose the thin current of Mr. Tredegar's eloquence. He was never quite at ease in the presence of an independent mind, and Justine often reflected that, even had the two men known nothing of each other's views, there would have been between them an instinctive and irreducible hostility--they would have disliked each other if they had merely jostled elbows in the street.

Yet even freed from Amherst's presence Mr. Tredegar showed a darkling brow, and as Justine slipped away after dinner she felt that she left Bessy to something more serious than the usual business conference.

How serious, she was to learn that very night, when, in the small hours, her friend burst in on her tearfully. Bessy was ruined--ruined--that was what Mr. Tredegar had come to tell her! She might have known he would not have travelled to Lynbrook for a trifle.... She had expected to find herself cramped, restricted--to be warned that she must "manage," hateful word!... But this! This was incredible! Unendurable! There was no money to build the gymnasium--none at all! And all because it had been swallowed up at Westmore--because the ridiculous changes there, the changes that nobody wanted, nobody approved of--that Truscomb and all the other experts had opposed and derided from the first--these changes, even modified and arrested, had already involved so much of her income, that it might be years--yes, he said _years_!--before she would feel herself free again--free of her own fortune, of Cicely's fortune...of the money poor Dick Westmore had meant his wife and child to enjoy!

Justine listened anxiously to this confused outpouring of resentments. Bessy's born incapacity for figures made it indeed possible that the facts came on her as a surprise--that she had quite forgotten the temporary reduction of her income, and had begun to imagine that what she had saved in one direction was hers to spend in another. All this was conceivable. But why had Mr. Tredegar drawn so dark a picture of the future? Or was it only that, thwarted of her immediate desire, Bessy's disappointment blackened the farthest verge of her horizon? Justine, though aware of her friend's lack of perspective, suspected that a conniving hand had helped to throw the prospect out of drawing....

Could it be possible, then, that Mr. Tredegar was among those who desired a divorce? That the influences at which Mrs. Ansell had hinted proceeded not only from Blanche Carbury and her group? Helpless amid this rush of forebodings, Justine could do no more than soothe and restrain--to reason would have been idle. She had never till now realized how completely she had lost ground with Bessy.

"The humiliation--before my friends! Oh, I was warned...my father, every one...for Cicely's sake I was warned...but I wouldn't listen--and _now_! From the first it was all he cared for--in Europe, even, he was always dragging me to factories. _Me?_--I was only the owner of Westmore! He wanted power--power, that's all--when he lost it he left me...oh, I'm glad now my baby is dead! Glad there's nothing between us--nothing, nothing in the world to tie us together any longer!"

The disproportion between this violent grief and its trivial cause would have struck Justine as simply grotesque, had she not understood that the incident of the gymnasium, which followed with cumulative pressure on a series of similar episodes, seemed to Bessy like the reaching out of a retaliatory hand--a mocking reminder that she was still imprisoned in the consequences of her unhappy marriage.

Such folly seemed past weeping for--it froze Justine's compassion into disdain, till she remembered that the sources of our sorrow are sometimes nobler than their means of expression, and that a baffled unappeased love was perhaps the real cause of Bessy's anger against her husband.

At any rate, the moment was a critical one, and Justine remembered with a pang that Mrs. Ansell had foreseen such a contingency, and implored her to take measures against it. She had refused, from a sincere dread of precipitating a definite estrangement--but had she been right in judging the situation so logically? With a creature of Bessy's emotional uncertainties the result of contending influences was really incalculable--it might still be that, at this juncture, Amherst's return would bring about a reaction of better feelings....

Justine sat and mused on these things after leaving her friend exhausted upon a tearful pillow. She felt that she had perhaps taken too large a survey of the situation--that the question whether there could ever be happiness between this tormented pair was not one to concern those who struggled for their welfare. Most marriages are a patch-work of jarring tastes and ill-assorted ambitions--if here and there, for a moment, two colours blend, two textures are the same, so much the better for the pattern! Justine, certainly, could foresee in reunion no positive happiness for either of her friends; but she saw positive disaster for Bessy in separation from her husband....

Suddenly she rose from her chair by the falling fire, and crossed over to the writing-table. She would write to Amherst herself--she would tell him to come. The decision once reached, hope flowed back to her heart--the joy of action so often deceived her into immediate faith in its results!

"Dear Mr. Amherst," she wrote, "the last time I saw you, you told me you would remember what I said. I ask you to do so now--to remember that I urged you not to be away too long. I believe you ought to come back now, though I know Bessy will not ask you to. I am writing without her knowledge, but with the conviction that she needs you, though perhaps without