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

afraid not. You'll find the papers and magazines in here."

Mildly but firmly she drove him in before her, and closing the door, advanced to the two women in the window. Amherst's hopes leapt up: perhaps she had come to fetch the visitors upstairs! He strained his ears to catch what was being said, and while he was thus absorbed the door opened, and turning at the sound he found himself face to face with his wife.

He had not reflected that Justine would be in her nurse's dress; and the sight of the dark blue uniform and small white cap, in which he had never seen her since their first meeting in the Hope Hospital, obliterated all bitter and unhappy memories, and gave him the illusion of passing back at once into the clear air of their early friendship. Then he looked at her and remembered.

He noticed that she had grown thinner than ever, or rather that her thinness, which had formerly had a healthy reed-like strength, now suggested fatigue and languor. And her face was spent, extinguished--the very eyes were lifeless. All her vitality seemed to have withdrawn itself into the arch of dense black hair which still clasped her forehead like the noble metal of some antique bust.

The sight stirred him with a deeper pity, a more vehement compunction; but the impulse to snatch her to him, and seek his pardon on her lips, was paralyzed by the sense that the three women in the window had stopped talking and turned their heads toward the door.

He held his hand out, and Justine's touched it for a moment; then he said in a low voice: "Is there no other place where I can see you?"

She made a negative gesture. "I am afraid not to-day."

Ah, her deep sweet voice--how completely his ear had lost the sound of it!

She looked doubtfully about the room, and pointed to a sofa at the end farthest from the windows.

"Shall we sit there?" she said.

He followed her in silence, and they sat down side by side. The matron had drawn up a chair and resumed her whispered conference with the women in the window. Between the two groups stretched the bare length of the room, broken only by a few arm-chairs of stained wood, and the marble-topped table covered with magazines.

The impossibility of giving free rein to his feelings developed in Amherst an unwonted intensity of perception, as though a sixth sense had suddenly emerged to take the place of those he could not use. And with this new-made faculty he seemed to gather up, and absorb into himself, as he had never done in their hours of closest communion, every detail of his wife's person, of her face and hands and gestures. He noticed how her full upper lids, of the tint of yellowish ivory, had a slight bluish discolouration, and how little thread-like blue veins ran across her temples to the roots of her hair. The emaciation of her face, and the hollow shades beneath her cheek-bones, made her mouth seem redder and fuller, though a little line on each side, where it joined the cheek, gave it a tragic droop. And her hands! When her fingers met his he recalled having once picked up, in the winter woods, the little feather-light skeleton of a frozen bird--and that was what her touch was like.

And it was he who had brought her to this by his cruelty, his obtuseness, his base readiness to believe the worst of her! He did not want to pour himself out in self-accusation--that seemed too easy a way of escape. He wanted simply to take her in his arms, to ask her to give him one more chance--and then to show her! And all the while he was paralyzed by the group in the window.

"Can't we go out? I must speak to you," he began again nervously.

"Not this afternoon--the doctor is coming. Tomorrow----"

"I can't wait for tomorrow!"

She made a faint, imperceptible gesture, which read to his eyes: "You've waited a whole year."

"Yes, I know," he returned, still constrained by the necessity of muffling his voice, of perpetually measuring the distance between themselves and the window. "I know what you might say--don't you suppose I've said it to myself a million times? But I didn't know--I couldn't imagine----"

She interrupted him with a rapid movement. "What do you know now?"

"What you promised Langhope----"

She turned her startled eyes on him, and he saw the blood run flame-like under her skin. "But _he_ promised not to speak!" she cried.

"He hasn't--to me. But such things make themselves known. Should you have been content to go on in that way forever?"

She raised her head and her eyes rested in his. "If you were," she answered simply.

"Justine!"

Again she checked him with a silencing motion. "Please tell me just what has happened."

"Not now--there's too much else to say. And nothing matters except that I'm with you."

"But Mr. Langhope----"

"He asks you to come. You're to see Cicely to-morrow."

Her lower lip trembled a little, and a tear flowed over and hung on her lashes.

"But what does all that matter now? We're together after this horrible year," he insisted.

She looked at him again. "But what is really changed?"

"Everything--everything! Not changed, I mean--just gone back."

"To where...we were...before?" she whispered; and he whispered back: "To where we were before."

There was a scraping of chairs on the floor, and with a sense of release Amherst saw that the colloquy in the window was over.

The two visitors, gathering their wraps about them, moved slowly across the room, still talking to the matron in excited undertones, through which, as they neared the threshold, the younger woman's staccato again broke out.

"I tell you, if she does go back to him, it'll never be the same between them!"

"Oh, Cora, I wouldn't say that," the other ineffectually wailed; then they moved toward the door, and a moment later it had closed on them.

Amherst turned to his wife with outstretched arms. "Say you forgive me, Justine!"

She held back a little from his entreating hands, not reproachfully, but as if with a last scruple for himself.

"There's nothing left...of the horror?" she asked below her breath.

"To be without you--that's the only horror!"

"You're _sure_----?"

"Sure!"

"It's just the same to you...just as it was...before?"

"Just the same, Justine!"

"It's not for myself, but you."

"Then, for me--never speak of it!" he implored.

"Because it's _not_ the same, then?" leapt from her.

"Because it's wiped out--because it's never been!"

"Never?"

"Never!"

He felt her yield to him at that, and under his eyes, close under his lips, was her face at last. But as they kissed they heard the handle of the door turn, and drew apart quickly, her hand lingering in his under the fold of her dress.

A nurse looked in, dressed in the white uniform and pointed cap of the hospital. Amherst fancied that she smiled a little as she saw them.

"Miss Brent--the doctor wants you to come right up and give the morphine."

The door shut again as Justine rose to her feet. Amherst remained seated--he had made no motion to retain her hand as it slipped from him.

"I'm coming," she called out to the retreating nurse; then she turned slowly and saw her husband's face.

"I must go," she said in a low tone.

Her eyes met his for a moment; but he looked away again as he stood up and reached for his hat.

"Tomorrow, then----" he said, without attempting to detain her.

"Tomorrow?"

"You must come away from here--you must come home," he repeated mechanically.

She made no answer, and he held his hand out and took hers. "Tomorrow," he said, drawing her toward him; and their lips met again, but not in the same kiss.


XLIII

JUNE again at Hanaford--and Cicely's birthday. The anniversary was to coincide, this year, with the opening of the old house at Hopewood, as a kind of pleasure-palace--gymnasium, concert-hall and museum--for the recreation of the mill-hands.

The idea had first come to Amherst on the winter afternoon when Bessy Westmore had confessed her love for him under the snow-laden trees of Hopewood. Even then the sense that his personal happiness was enlarged and secured by its promise of happiness to others had made him wish that the scene associated with the opening of his new life should be made to commemorate a corresponding change in the fortunes of Westmore. But when the control of the mills passed into his hands other and more necessary improvements pressed upon him; and it was not till now that the financial condition of the company had permitted the execution of his plan.

Justine, on her return to Hanaford, had found the work already in progress, and had been told by her husband that he was carrying out a projected scheme of Bessy's. She had felt a certain surprise, but had concluded that the plan in question dated back to the early days of his first marriage, when, in his wife's eyes, his connection with the mills still invested them with interest.

Since Justine had come back to her husband, both had tacitly avoided all allusions to the past, and the recreation-house at Hopewood being, as she divined, in some sort an expiatory offering to Bessy's plaintive shade, she had purposely refrained from questioning Amherst about its progress, and had simply approved the plans he submitted to her.

Fourteen months had passed since her return, and now, as she sat beside her husband in the carriage which was conveying them to Hopewood, she said to herself that her life had at last fallen into what promised to be its final shape--that as things now were they would probably be to the end. And outwardly at least they were what she and Amherst had always dreamed of their being. Westmore prospered under the new rule. The seeds of life they had sown there were springing up in a promising growth of bodily health and mental activity, and above all in a dawning social consciousness. The mill-hands were beginning to understand the meaning of their work, in its relation to their own lives and to the larger economy. And outwardly, also, the new growth was showing itself in the humanized aspect of the place. Amherst's young maples were tall enough now to cast a shade on the grass-bordered streets; and the well-kept turf, the bright cottage gardens, the new central group of library, hospital and club-house, gave to the mill-village the hopeful air of a "rising" residential suburb.

In the bright June light, behind their fresh green mantle of trees and creepers, even the factory buildings looked less stern and prison-like than formerly; and the turfing and planting of the adjoining river-banks had transformed a waste of foul mud and refuse into a little park where the operatives might refresh themselves at midday.

Yes--Westmore was alive at last: the dead city of which Justine had once spoken had risen from its grave, and its blank face had taken on a meaning. As Justine glanced at her husband she saw that the same thought was in his mind. However achieved, at whatever cost of personal misery and error, the work of awakening and freeing Westmore was done, and that work had justified itself.

She looked from Amherst to Cicely, who sat opposite, eager