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

unexpectedly--for one miserable moment she had thought first of herself! Ah, that importunate, irrepressible self--the _moi haïssable_ of the Christian--if only one could tear it from one's breast! She had missed an opportunity--her last opportunity perhaps! By this time, even, a hundred hostile influences, cold whispers of vanity, of selfishness, of worldly pride, might have drawn their freezing ring about Bessy's heart....

Justine started up to follow her...then paused, recalling her last words. "Let us not talk now--I can't!" She had no right to intrude on that bleeding privacy--if the chance had been hers she had lost it. She dropped back into her seat at the desk, hiding her face in her hands.

Presently she heard the clock strike, and true to her tireless instinct of activity, she lifted her head, took up her pen, and went on with the correspondence she had dropped.... It was hard at first to collect her thoughts, or even to summon to her pen the conventional phrases that sufficed for most of the notes. Groping for a word, she pushed aside her writing and stared out at the sallow frozen landscape framed by the window at which she sat. The sleet had ceased, and hollows of sunless blue showed through the driving wind-clouds. A hard sky and a hard ground--frost-bound ringing earth under rigid ice-mailed trees.

As Justine looked out, shivering a little, she saw a woman's figure riding down the avenue toward the gate. The figure disappeared behind a clump of evergreens--showed again farther down, through the boughs of a skeleton beech--and revealed itself in the next open space as Bessy--Bessy in the saddle on a day of glaring frost, when no horse could keep his footing out of a walk!

Justine went to the window and strained her eyes for a confirming glimpse. Yes--it was Bessy! There was no mistaking that light flexible figure, every line swaying true to the beat of the horse's stride. But Justine remembered that Bessy had not meant to ride--had countermanded her horse because of the bad going.... Well, she was a perfect horsewoman and had no doubt chosen her surest-footed mount...probably the brown cob, Tony Lumpkin.

But when did Tony's sides shine so bright through the leafless branches? And when did he sweep his rider on with such long free play of the hind-quarters? Horse and rider shot into sight again, rounding the curve of the avenue near the gates, and in a break of sunlight Justine saw the glitter of chestnut flanks--and remembered that Impulse was the only chestnut in the stables....

* * * * *

She went back to her seat and continued writing. Bessy had left a formidable heap of bills and letters; and when this was demolished, Justine had her own correspondence to despatch. She had heard that morning from the matron of Saint Elizabeth's: an interesting "case" was offered her, but she must come within two days. For the first few hours she had wavered, loath to leave Lynbrook without some definite light on her friend's future; but now Amherst's letter had shed that light--or rather, had deepened the obscurity--and she had no pretext for lingering on where her uselessness had been so amply demonstrated.

She wrote to the matron accepting the engagement; and the acceptance involved the writing of other letters, the general reorganizing of that minute polity, the life of Justine Brent. She smiled a little to think how easily she could be displaced and transplanted--how slender were her material impedimenta, how few her invisible bonds! She was as light and detachable as a dead leaf on the autumn breeze--yet she was in the season of sap and flower, when there is life and song in the trees!

But she did not think long of herself, for an undefinable anxiety ran through her thoughts like a black thread. It found expression, now and then, in the long glances she threw through the window--in her rising to consult the clock and compare her watch with it--in a nervous snatch of humming as she paced the room once or twice before going back to her desk....

Why was Bessy so late? Dusk was falling already--the early end of the cold slate-hued day. But Bessy always rode late--there was always a rational answer to Justine's irrational conjectures.... It was the sight of those chestnut flanks that tormented her--she knew of Bessy's previous struggles with the mare. But the indulging of idle apprehensions was not in her nature, and when the tea-tray came, and with it Cicely, sparkling from a gusty walk, and coral-pink in her cloud of crinkled hair, Justine sprang up and cast off her cares.

It cost her a pang, again, to see the lamps lit and the curtains drawn--shutting in the warmth and brightness of the house from that wind-swept frozen twilight through which Bessy rode alone. But the icy touch of the thought slipped from Justine's mind as she bent above the tea-tray, gravely measuring Cicely's milk into a "grown-up" teacup, hearing the confidential details of the child's day, and capping them with banter and fantastic narrative.

She was not sorry to go--ah, no! The house had become a prison to her, with ghosts walking its dreary floors. But to lose Cicely would be bitter--she had not felt how bitter till the child pressed against her in the firelight, insisting raptly, with little sharp elbows stabbing her knee: "And _then_ what happened, Justine?"

The door opened, and some one came in to look at the fire. Justine, through the mazes of her fairy-tale, was dimly conscious that it was Knowles, and not one of the footmen...the proud Knowles, who never mended the fires himself.... As he passed out again, hovering slowly down the long room, she rose, leaving Cicely on the hearth-rug, and followed him to the door.

"Has Mrs. Amherst not come in?" she asked, not knowing why she wished to ask it out of the child's hearing.

"No, miss. I looked in myself to see--thinking she might have come by the side-door."

"She may have gone to her sitting-room."

"She's not upstairs."

They both paused. Then Justine said: "What horse was she riding?"

"Impulse, Miss." The butler looked at his large responsible watch. "It's not late--" he said, more to himself than to her.

"No. Has she been riding Impulse lately?"

"No, Miss. Not since that day the mare nearly had her off. I understood Mr. Amherst did not wish it."

Justine went back to Cicely and the fairy-tale.--As she took up the thread of the Princess's adventures, she asked herself why she had ever had any hope of helping Bessy. The seeds of disaster were in the poor creature's soul.... Even when she appeared to be moved, lifted out of herself, her escaping impulses were always dragged back to the magnetic centre of hard distrust and resistance that sometimes forms the core of soft-fibred natures. As she had answered her husband's previous appeal by her flight to the woman he disliked, so she answered this one by riding the horse he feared.... Justine's last illusions crumbled. The distance between two such natures was unspannable. Amherst had done well to remain away...and with a tidal rush her sympathies swept back to his side....

* * * * *

The governess came to claim Cicely. One of the footmen came to put another log on the fire. Then the rite of removing the tea-table was majestically performed--the ceremonial that had so often jarred on Amherst's nerves. As she watched it, Justine had a vague sense of the immutability of the household routine--a queer awed feeling that, whatever happened, a machine so perfectly adjusted would work on inexorably, like a natural law....

She rose to look out of the window, staring vainly into blackness between the parted curtains. As she turned back, passing the writing-table, she noticed that Cicely's irruption had made her forget to post her letters--an unusual oversight. A glance at the clock told her that she was not too late for the mail--reminding her, at the same time, that it was scarcely three hours since Bessy had started on her ride.... She saw the foolishness of her fears. Even in winter, Bessy often rode for more than three hours; and now that the days were growing longer----

Suddenly reassured, Justine went out into the hall, intending to carry her batch of letters to the red pillar-box by the door. As she did so, a cold blast struck her. Could it be that for once the faultless routine of the house had been relaxed, that one of the servants had left the outer door ajar? She walked over to the vestibule--yes, both doors were wide. The night rushed in on a vicious wind. As she pushed the vestibule door shut, she heard the dogs sniffing and whining on the threshold. She crossed the vestibule, and heard voices and the tramping of feet in the darkness--then saw a lantern gleam. Suddenly Knowles shot out of the night--the lantern struck on his bleached face.

Justine, stepping back, pressed the electric button in the wall, and the wide door-step was abruptly illuminated, with its huddled, pushing, heavily-breathing group...black figures writhing out of darkness, strange faces distorted in the glare.

"Bessy!" she cried, and sprang forward; but suddenly Wyant was before her, his hand on her arm; and as the dreadful group struggled by into the hall, he froze her to him with a whisper: "The spine----"


XXVI

WITHIN Justine there was a moment's darkness; then, like terror-struck workers rallying to their tasks, every faculty was again at its post, receiving and transmitting signals, taking observations, anticipating orders, making her brain ring with the hum of a controlled activity.

She had known the sensation before--the transmuting of terror and pity into this miraculous lucidity of thought and action; but never had it snatched her from such depths. Oh, thank heaven for her knowledge now--for the trained mind that could take command of her senses and bend them firmly to its service!

Wyant seconded her well, after a moment's ague-fit of fear. She pitied and pardoned the moment, aware of its cause, and respecting him for the way in which he rose above it into the clear air of professional self-command. Through the first hours they worked shoulder to shoulder, conscious of each other only as of kindred will-powers, stretched to the utmost tension of discernment and activity, and hardly needing speech or look to further their swift co-operation. It was thus that she had known him in the hospital, in the heat of his youthful zeal: the doctor she liked best to work with, because no other so tempered ardour with judgment.

The great surgeon, arriving from town at midnight, confirmed his diagnosis: there was undoubted injury to the spine. Other consultants were summoned in haste, and in the winter dawn the verdict was pronounced--a fractured vertebra, and possibly lesion of the cord....

Justine got a moment alone when the surgeons returned to the sick-room. Other nurses were there now, capped, aproned, quickly and silently unpacking their appliances.... She must call a halt, clear her brain again, decide rapidly what was to be done next.... Oh, if only the crawling hours could bring Amherst! It was strange that there was no telegram yet--no, not strange, after all, since it was barely six in the morning, and her message had not