The Fruit of the Tree

by Edith Wharton

  XIX

  IT was late in October when Amherst returned to Lynbrook.

  He had begun to learn, in the interval, the lesson most difficult to hisdirect and trenchant nature: that compromise is the law of married life.On the afternoon of his talk with his wife he had sought her out,determined to make a final effort to clear up the situation betweenthem; but he learned that, immediately after luncheon, she had gone offin the motor with Mrs. Carbury and two men of the party, leaving wordthat they would probably not be back till evening. It cost Amherst astruggle, when he had humbled himself to receive this information fromthe butler, not to pack his portmanteau and take the first train forHanaford; but he was still under the influence of Justine Brent's words,and also of his own feeling that, at this juncture, a break betweenhimself and Bessy would be final.

  He stayed on accordingly, enduring as best he might the mute observationof the household, and the gentle irony of Mr. Langhope's attentions; andbefore he left Lynbrook, two days later, a provisional understanding hadbeen reached.

  His wife proved more firm than he had foreseen in her resolve to regaincontrol of her income, and the talk between them ended in reciprocalconcessions, Bessy consenting to let the town house for the winter andremain at Lynbrook, while Amherst agreed to restrict his improvements atWestmore to such alterations as had already been begun, and to reducethe expenditure on these as much as possible. It was virtually thedefeat of his policy, and he had to suffer the decent triumph of theGaineses, as well as the bitterer pang of his foiled aspirations. Inspite of the opposition of the directors, he had taken advantage ofTruscomb's resignation to put Duplain at the head of the mills; but thenew manager's outspoken disgust at the company's change of plan made itclear that he would not remain long at Westmore, and it was one of themiseries of Amherst's situation that he could not give the reasons forhis defection, but must bear to figure in Duplain's terse vocabulary asa "quitter." The difficulty of finding a new manager expert enough tosatisfy the directors, yet in sympathy with his own social theories,made Amherst fear that Duplain's withdrawal would open the way forTruscomb's reinstatement, an outcome on which he suspected HalfordGaines had always counted; and this possibility loomed before him as thefinal defeat of his hopes.

  Meanwhile the issues ahead had at least the merit of keeping him busy.The task of modifying and retrenching his plans contrasted drearily withthe hopeful activity of the past months, but he had an iron capacity forhard work under adverse conditions, and the fact of being too busy forthought helped him to wear through the days. This pressure of workrelieved him, at first, from too close consideration of his relation toBessy. He had yielded up his dearest hopes at her wish, and for themoment his renunciation had set a chasm between them; but gradually hesaw that, as he was patching together the ruins of his Westmore plans,so he must presently apply himself to the reconstruction of his marriedlife.

  Before leaving Lynbrook he had had a last word with Miss Brent; not aword of confidence--for the same sense of reserve kept both from anyexplicit renewal of their moment's intimacy--but one of those exchangesof commonplace phrase that circumstances may be left to charge withspecial meaning. Justine had merely asked if he were really leaving and,on his assenting, had exclaimed quickly: "But you will come back soon?"

  "I shall certainly come back," he answered; and after a pause he added:"I shall find you here? You will remain at Lynbrook?"

  On her part also there was a shade of hesitation; then she said with asmile: "Yes, I shall stay."

  His look brightened. "And you'll write me if anything--if Bessy shouldnot be well?"

  "I will write you," she promised; and a few weeks after his return toHanaford he had, in fact, received a short note from her. Its ostensiblepurpose was to reassure him as to Bessy's health, which had certainlygrown stronger since Dr. Wyant had persuaded her, at the close of thelast house-party, to accord herself a period of quiet; but (the writeradded) now that Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell had also left, the quietwas perhaps too complete, and Bessy's nerves were beginning to sufferfrom the reaction.

  Amherst had no difficulty in interpreting this brief communication. "Ihave succeeded in dispersing the people who are always keeping you andyour wife apart; now is your chance: come and take it." That was whatMiss Brent's letter meant; and his answer was a telegram to Bessy,announcing his return to Long Island.

  The step was not an easy one; but decisive action, however hard, wasalways easier to Amherst than the ensuing interval of readjustment. Tocome to Lynbrook had required a strong effort of will; but the effort ofremaining there called into play less disciplined faculties.

  Amherst had always been used to doing things; now he had to resignhimself to enduring a state of things. The material facilities of thelife about him, the way in which the machinery of the great empty houseran on like some complex apparatus working in the void, increased theexasperation of his nerves. Dr. Wyant's suggestion--which Amherstsuspected Justine of having prompted--that Mrs. Amherst should cancelher autumn engagements, and give herself up to a quiet outdoor life withher husband, seemed to present the very opportunity these two distractedspirits needed to find and repossess each other. But, though Amherst wasgrateful to Bessy for having dismissed her visitors--partly to pleasehim, as he guessed--yet he found the routine of the establishment moreoppressive than when the house was full. If he could have been alonewith her in a quiet corner--the despised cottage at Westmore, even!--hefancied they might still have been brought together by restricted spaceand the familiar exigencies of life. All the primitive necessities whichbind together, through their recurring daily wants, natures fated tofind no higher point of union, had been carefully eliminated from thelife at Lynbrook, where material needs were not only provided for butanticipated by a hidden mechanism that filled the house with theperpetual sense of invisible attendance. Though Amherst knew that he andBessy could never meet in the region of great issues, he thought hemight have regained the way to her heart, and found relief from his owninaction, in the small ministrations of daily life; but the next momenthe smiled to picture Bessy in surroundings where the clocks were notwound of themselves and the doors did not fly open at her approach.Those thick-crowding cares and drudgeries which serve as mercifulscreens between so many discordant natures would have been asintolerable to her as was to Amherst the great glare of leisure in whichhe and she were now confronted.

  He saw that Bessy was in the state of propitiatory eagerness whichalways followed on her gaining a point in their long duel; and he couldguess that she was tremulously anxious not only to make up to him, byall the arts she knew, for the sacrifice she had exacted, but also toconceal from every one the fact that, as Mr. Langhope bluntly put it, hehad been "brought to terms." Amherst was touched by her efforts, andhalf-ashamed of his own inability to respond to them. But his mind,released from its normal preoccupations, had become a dangerousinstrument of analysis and disintegration, and conditions which, a fewmonths before, he might have accepted with the wholesome tolerance ofthe busy man, now pressed on him unendurably. He saw that he and hiswife were really face to face for the first time since their marriage.Hitherto something had always intervened between them--first the spellof her grace and beauty, and the brief joy of her participation in hiswork; then the sorrow of their child's death, and after that thetemporary exhilaration of carrying out his ideas at Westmore--but nowthat the last of these veils had been torn away they faced each other asstrangers.

  * * * * *

  The habit of keeping factory hours always drove Amherst forth longbefore his wife's day began, and in the course of one of his earlytramps he met Miss Brent and Cicely setting out for a distant swampwhere rumour had it that a rare native orchid might be found. Justine'ssylvan tastes had developed in the little girl a passion for suchpillaging expeditions, and Cicely, who had discovered that herstep-father knew almost as much about birds and squirrels as Miss Brentdid about flowers, was not to be appeased till Amherst had scrambledinto the po
ny-cart, wedging his long legs between a fern-box and alunch-basket, and balancing a Scotch terrier's telescopic body acrosshis knees.

  The season was so mild that only one or two light windless frosts hadsinged the foliage of oaks and beeches, and gilded the roadsides with asmooth carpeting of maple leaves. The morning haze rose like smoke fromburnt-out pyres of sumach and sugar-maple; a silver bloom lay on thefurrows of the ploughed fields; and now and then, as they drove on, thewooded road showed at its end a tarnished disk of light, where sea andsky were merged.

  At length they left the road for a winding track through scrub-oaks andglossy thickets of mountain-laurel; the track died out at the foot of awooded knoll, and clambering along its base they came upon the swamp.There it lay in charmed solitude, shut in by a tawny growth of larch andswamp-maple, its edges burnt out to smouldering shades of russet,ember-red and ashen-grey, while the quaking centre still preserved ajewel-like green, where hidden lanes of moisture wound between isletstufted with swamp-cranberry and with the charred browns of fern and wildrose and bay. Sodden earth and decaying branches gave forth a strangesweet odour, as of the aromatic essences embalming a dead summer; andthe air charged with this scent was so still that the snapping ofwitch-hazel pods, the drop of a nut, the leap of a startled frog,pricked the silence with separate points of sound.

  The pony made fast, the terrier released, and fern-box and lunch-basketslung over Amherst's shoulder, the three explorers set forth on theirjourney. Amherst, as became his sex, went first; but after a fewabsent-minded plunges into the sedgy depths between the islets, he wasordered to relinquish his command and fall to the rear, where he mightperform the humbler service of occasionally lifting Cicely overunspannable gulfs of moisture.

  Justine, leading the way, guided them across the treacherous surface asfearlessly as a king-fisher, lighting instinctively on everygrass-tussock and submerged tree-stump of the uncertain path. Now andthen she paused, her feet drawn close on their narrow perch, and herslender body swaying over as she reached down for some rare growthdetected among the withered reeds and grasses; then she would rightherself again by a backward movement as natural as the upward spring ofa branch--so free and flexible in all her motions that she seemed akinto the swaying reeds and curving brambles which caught at her as shepassed.

  At length the explorers reached the mossy corner where the orchids grew,and Cicely, securely balanced on a fallen tree-trunk, was allowed to digthe coveted roots. When they had been packed away, it was felt that thisculminating moment must be celebrated with immediate libations of jamand milk; and having climbed to a dry slope among the pepper-bushes, theparty fell on the contents of the lunch-basket. It was just the hourwhen Bessy's maid was carrying her breakfast-tray, with its delicateservice of old silver and porcelain, into the darkened bed-room atLynbrook; but early rising and hard scrambling had whetted the appetitesof the naturalists, and the nursery fare which Cicely spread beforethem seemed a sumptuous reward for their toil.

  "I do like this kind of picnic much better than the ones where mothertakes all the footmen, and the mayonnaise has to be scraped off thingsbefore I can eat them," Cicely declared, lifting her foaming mouth froma beaker of milk.

  Amherst, lighting his pipe, stretched himself contentedly among thepepper-bushes, steeped in that unreflecting peace which is shed intosome hearts by communion with trees and sky. He too was glad to get awayfrom the footmen and the mayonnaise, and he imagined that hisstepdaughter's exclamation summed up all the reasons for his happiness.The boyish wood-craft which he had cultivated in order to encourage thesame taste in his factory lads came to life in this sudden return tonature, and he redeemed his clumsiness in crossing the swamp by spying amarsh-wren's nest that had escaped Justine, and detecting in aswiftly-flitting olive-brown bird a belated tanager in autumn incognito.

  Cicely sat rapt while he pictured the bird's winter pilgrimage, withglimpses of the seas and islands that fled beneath him till his longsouthern flight ended in the dim glades of the equatorial forests.

  "Oh, what a good life--how I should like to be a wander-bird, and lookdown people's chimneys twice a year!" Justine laughed, tilting her headback to catch a last glimpse of the tanager.

  The sun beamed full on their ledge from a sky of misty blue, and she hadthrown aside her hat, uncovering her thick waves of hair, blue-black inthe hollows, with warm rusty edges where they took the light. Cicelydragged down a plumy spray of traveller's joy and wound it above herfriend's forehead; and thus wreathed, with her bright pallour relievedagainst the dusky autumn tints, Justine looked like a wood-spirit whohad absorbed into herself the last golden juices of the year.

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

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

  "Oh, I don't know--I should love it all! Think of the joy of skimmingover 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 theworld _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 ofit makes me feel as if I were chained. But I think if I had wings Ishould choose to be a house-swallow; and then, after I'd had my fill ofwonders, I should come back to my familiar corner, and my house full ofbusy humdrum people, and fly low to warn them of rain, and wheel up highto show them it was good haying weather, and know what was going on inevery room in the house, and every house in the village; and all thewhile I should be hugging my wonderful big secret--the secret ofsnow-plains and burning deserts, and coral islands and buriedcities--and should put it all into my chatter under the eaves, that thepeople in the house were always too busy to stop and listen to--and whenwinter came I'm sure I should hate to leave them, even to go back to mygreat Brazilian forests full of orchids and monkeys!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Amherst smiled. "Ah, there it is--one never knows--one never says, _Thisis the moment_! because, however good it is, it always seems the door toa better one beyond. Faust never said it till the end, when he'd nothingleft of all he began by thinking worth while; and then, with what adifference it was said!"

  She pondered. "Yes--but it _was_ the best, after all--the moment inwhich 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 andeyes, her fair hair--of her mother's very hue--ma
king a shining hazeabout her face, Amherst recalled the winter evening at Hopewood, when heand Bessy had tracked the grey squirrel under the snowy beeches.Scarcely three years ago--and how bitter memory had turned! A chillycloud spread over his spirit, reducing everything once more to theleaden hue of reality....

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