XXXIX
WHEN Amherst, returning late that afternoon from Westmore, learned ofhis wife's departure, and read the note she had left, he found it, for atime, impossible to bring order out of the confusion of feeling producedin him.
His mind had been disturbed enough before. All day, through the routineof work at the mills, he had laboured inwardly with the difficultiesconfronting him; and his unrest had been increased by the fact that hissituation bore an ironic likeness to that in which, from a far differentcause, he had found himself at the other crisis of his life. Once morehe was threatened with the possibility of having to give up Westmore, ata moment when concentration of purpose and persistency of will were atlast beginning to declare themselves in tangible results. Before, he hadonly given up dreams; now it was their fruition that he was asked tosurrender. And he was fixed in his resolve to withdraw absolutely fromWestmore if the statement he had to make to Mr. Langhope was receivedwith the least hint of an offensive mental reservation. All forms ofmoral compromise had always been difficult to Amherst, and like many menabsorbed in large and complicated questions he craved above allclearness and peace in his household relation. The first months of hissecond marriage had brought him, as a part of richer and deeper joys,this enveloping sense of a clear moral medium, in which no subterfuge orequivocation could draw breath. He had felt that henceforth he couldpour into his work all the combative energy, the powers of endurance,resistance, renovation, which had once been unprofitably dissipated inthe vain attempt to bring some sort of harmony into life with Bessy.Between himself and Justine, apart from their love for each other, therewas the wider passion for their kind, which gave back to them anenlarged and deepened reflection of their personal feeling. In such anair it had seemed that no petty egotism could hamper their growth, nomisintelligence obscure their love; yet all the while this purehappiness had been unfolding against a sordid background of falsehoodand intrigue from which his soul turned with loathing.
Justine was right in assuming that Amherst had never thought much aboutwomen. He had vaguely regarded them as meant to people that hazy domainof feeling designed to offer the busy man an escape from thought. Hissecond marriage, leading him to the blissful discovery that woman canthink as well as feel, that there are beings of the ornamental sex inwhom brain and heart have so enlarged each other that their emotions areas clear as thought, their thoughts as warm as emotions--this discoveryhad had the effect of making him discard his former summary conceptionof woman as a bundle of inconsequent impulses, and admit her at a stroketo full mental equality with her lord. The result of this act ofmanumission was, that in judging Justine he could no longer allow forwhat was purely feminine in her conduct. It was incomprehensible to himthat she, to whom truth had seemed the essential element of life, shouldhave been able to draw breath, and find happiness, in an atmosphere offalsehood and dissimulation. His mind could assent--at least in theabstract--to the reasonableness of her act; but he was still unable tounderstand her having concealed it from him. He could enter far enoughinto her feelings to allow for her having kept silence on his firstreturn to Lynbrook, when she was still under the strain of a prolongedand terrible trial; but that she should have continued to do so when heand she had discovered and confessed their love for each other, threw anintolerable doubt on her whole course.
He stayed late at the mills, finding one pretext after another fordelaying his return to Hanaford, and trying, while he gave one part ofhis mind to the methodical performance of his task, to adjust the otherto some definite view of the future. But all was darkened and confusedby the sense that, between himself and Justine, complete communion ofthought was no longer possible. It had, in fact, never existed; therehad always been a locked chamber in her mind, and he knew not yet whatother secrets might inhabit it.
The shock of finding her gone when he reached home gave a new turn tohis feelings. She had made no mystery of her destination, leaving wordwith the servants that she had gone to town to see Mr. Langhope; andAmherst found a note from her on his study table.
"I feel," she wrote, "that I ought to see Mr. Langhope myself, and bethe first to tell him what must be told. It was like you, dearest, towish to spare me this, but it would have made me more unhappy; and Mr.Langhope might wish to hear the facts in my own words. I shall come backtomorrow, and after that it will be for you to decide what must bedone."
The brevity and simplicity of the note were characteristic; in momentsof high tension Justine was always calm and direct. And it was like her,too, not to make any covert appeal to his sympathy, not to seek toentrap his judgment by caressing words and plaintive allusions. Thequiet tone in which she stated her purpose matched the firmness andcourage of the act, and for a moment Amherst was shaken by a revulsionof feeling. Her heart was level with his, after all--if she had donewrong she would bear the brunt of it alone. It was so exactly what hehimself would have felt and done in such a situation that faith in herflowed back through all the dried channels of his heart. But an instantlater the current set the other way. The wretched years of his firstmarriage had left in him a residue of distrust, a tendency to dissociateevery act from its ostensible motive. He had been too profoundly thedupe of his own enthusiasm not to retain this streak of scepticism, andit now moved him to ask if Justine's sudden departure had not beenprompted by some other cause than the one she avowed. Had that aloneactuated her, why not have told it to him, and asked his consent to herplan? Why let him leave the house without a hint of her purpose, andslip off by the first train as soon as he was safe at Westmore? Might itnot be that she had special reasons for wishing Mr. Langhope to _hearher own version first_--that there were questions she wished to parryherself, explanations she could trust no one to make for her? Thethought plunged Amherst into deeper misery. He knew not how to defendhimself against these disintegrating suspicions--he felt only that, oncethe accord between two minds is broken, it is less easy to restore thanthe passion between two hearts. He dragged heavily through his solitaryevening, and awaited with dread and yet impatience a message announcinghis wife's return.
* * * * *
It would have been easier--far easier--when she left Mr. Langhope'sdoor, to go straight out into the darkness and let it close in on herfor good.
Justine felt herself yielding to the spell of that suggestion as shewalked along the lamplit pavement, hardly conscious of the turn hersteps were taking. The door of the house which a few weeks before hadbeen virtually hers had closed on her without a question. She had beensuffered to go out into the darkness without being asked whither she wasgoing, or under what roof her night would be spent. The contrast betweenher past and present sounded through the tumult of her thoughts like theevil laughter of temptation. The house at Hanaford, to which she wasreturning, would look at her with the same alien face--nowhere on earth,at that moment, was a door which would open to her like the door ofhome.
In her painful self-absorption she followed the side street towardMadison Avenue, and struck southward down that tranquil thoroughfare.There was a physical relief in rapid motion, and she walked on, stillhardly aware of her direction, toward the clustered lights of MadisonSquare. Should she return to Hanaford, she had still several hours todispose of before the departure of the midnight train; and if she didnot return, hours and dates no longer existed for her.
It would be easier--infinitely easier--not to go back. To take up herlife with Amherst would, under any circumstances, be painful enough; totake it up under the tacit restriction of her pledge to Mr. Langhopeseemed more than human courage could face. As she approached the squareshe had almost reached the conclusion that such a temporary renewal wasbeyond her strength--beyond what any standard of duty exacted. Thequestion of an alternative hardly troubled her. She would simply go onliving, and find an escape in work and material hardship. It would notbe hard for so inconspicuous a person to slip back into the obscure massof humanity.
She paused a moment on the edge of the square, vaguely seeking
adirection for her feet that might permit the working of her thoughts togo on uninterrupted; and as she stood there, her eyes fell on the benchnear the corner of Twenty-sixth Street, where she had sat with Amherston the day of his flight from Lynbrook. He too had dreamed of escapingfrom insoluble problems into the clear air of hard work and simpleduties; and she remembered the words with which she had turned him back.The cases, of course, were not identical, since he had been flying inanger and wounded pride from a situation for which he was in no wise toblame; yet, if even at such a moment she had insisted on charity andforbearance, how could she now show less self-denial than she hadexacted of him?
"If you go away for a time, surely it ought to be in such a way thatyour going does not seem to cast any reflection on Bessy...." That washow she had put it to him, and how, with the mere change of a name, shemust now, for reasons as cogent, put it to herself. It was just as mucha part of the course she had planned to return to her husband now, andtake up their daily life together, as it would, later on, be her duty todrop out of that life, when her doing so could no longer involve him inthe penalty to be paid.
She stood a little while looking at the bench on which they had sat, andgiving thanks in her heart for the past strength which was now helpingto build up her failing courage: such a patchwork business are our bestendeavours, yet so faithfully does each weak upward impulse reach back ahand to the next.
* * * * *
Justine's explanation of her visit to Mr. Langhope was not whollysatisfying to her husband. She did not conceal from him that the scenehad been painful, but she gave him to understand, as briefly aspossible, that Mr. Langhope, after his first movement of uncontrollabledistress, had seemed able to make allowances for the pressure underwhich she had acted, and that he had, at any rate, given no sign ofintending to let her confession make any change in the relation betweenthe households. If she did not--as Amherst afterward recalled--put allthis specifically into words, she contrived to convey it in her manner,in her allusions, above all in her recovered composure. She had thedemeanour of one who has gone through a severe test of strength, butcome out of it in complete control of the situation. There was somethingslightly unnatural in this prompt solution of so complicated adifficulty, and it had the effect of making Amherst ask himself what, toproduce such a result, must have been the gist of her communication toMr. Langhope. If the latter had shown any disposition to be cruel, oreven unjust, Amherst's sympathies would have rushed instantly to hiswife's defence; but the fact that there was apparently to be no call onthem left his reason free to compare and discriminate, with the finalresult that the more he pondered on his father-in-law's attitude theless intelligible it became.
A few days after Justine's return he was called to New York on business;and before leaving he told her that he should of course take theopportunity of having a talk with Mr. Langhope.
She received the statement with the gentle composure from which she hadnot departed since her return from town; and he added tentatively, as ifto provoke her to a clearer expression of feeling: "I shall not besatisfied, of course, till I see for myself just how he feels--just howmuch, at bottom, this has affected him--since my own future relation tohim will, as I have already told you, depend entirely on his treatmentof you."
She met this without any sign of disturbance. "His treatment of me wasvery kind," she said. "But would it not, on your part," she continuedhesitatingly, "be kinder not to touch on the subject so soon again?"
The line deepened between his brows. "Touch on it? I sha'n't rest tillI've gone to the bottom of it! Till then, you must understand," hesummed up with decision, "I feel myself only on sufferance here atWestmore."
"Yes--I understand," she assented; and as he bent over to kiss her forgoodbye a tenuous impenetrable barrier seemed to lie between their lips.
* * * * *
It was Justine's turn to await with a passionate anxiety her husband'shome-coming; and when, on the third day, he reappeared, her dearlyacquired self-control gave way to a tremulous eagerness. This was, afterall, the turning-point in their lives: everything depended on how Mr.Langhope had "played up" to his cue; had kept to his side of their bond.
Amherst's face showed signs of emotional havoc: when feeling once brokeout in him it had full play, and she could see that his hour with Mr.Langhope had struck to the roots of life. But the resultant expressionwas one of invigoration, not defeat; and she gathered at a glance thather partner had not betrayed her. She drew a tragic solace from thesuccess of her achievement; yet it flung her into her husband's armswith a passion of longing to which, as she instantly felt, he did not ascompletely respond.
There was still, then, something "between" them: somewhere the mechanismof her scheme had failed, or its action had not produced the result shehad counted on.
As soon as they were alone in the study she said, as quietly as shecould: "You saw your father-in-law? You talked with him?"
"Yes--I spent the afternoon with him. Cicely sent you her love."
She coloured at the mention of the child's name and murmured: "And Mr.Langhope?"
"He is perfectly calm now--perfectly impartial.--This business has mademe feel," Amherst added abruptly, "that I have never been quite fair tohim. I never thought him a magnanimous man."
"He has proved himself so," Justine murmured, her head bent low over abit of needlework; and Amherst affirmed energetically: "He has been morethan that--generous!"
She looked up at him with a smile. "I am so glad, dear; so glad there isnot to be the least shadow between you...."
"No," Amherst said, his voice flagging slightly. There was a pause, andthen he went on with renewed emphasis: "Of course I made my point clearto him."
"Your point?"
"That I stand or fall by his judgment of you."
Oh, if he had but said it more tenderly! But he delivered it with thequiet resolution of a man who contends for an abstract principle ofjustice, and not for a passion grown into the fibres of his heart!
"You are generous too," she faltered, her voice trembling a little.
Amherst frowned; and she perceived that any hint, on her part, ofrecognizing the slightest change in their relations was still likepressure on a painful bruise.
"There is no need for such words between us," he said impatiently; "andMr. Langhope's attitude," he added, with an effort at a lighter tone,"has made it unnecessary, thank heaven, that we should ever revert tothe subject again."
He turned to his desk as he spoke, and plunged into perusal of theletters that had accumulated in his absence.
* * * * *
There was a temporary excess of work at Westmore, and during the daysthat followed he threw himself into it with a zeal that showed Justinehow eagerly he sought any pretext for avoiding confidential moments. Theperception was painful enough, yet not as painful as another discoverythat awaited her. She too had her tasks at Westmore: the supervision ofthe hospital, the day nursery, the mothers' club, and the various otherorganizations whereby she and Amherst were trying to put some sort ofsocial unity into the lives of the mill-hands; and when, on the dayafter his return from New York, she presented herself, as usual, at theWestmore office, where she was in the habit of holding a briefconsultation with him before starting on her rounds, she was at onceaware of a new tinge of constraint in his manner. It hurt him, then, tosee her at Westmore--hurt him more than to live with her, at Hanaford,under Bessy's roof! For it was there, at the mills, that his real lifewas led, the life with which Justine had been most identified, the lifethat had been made possible for both by the magnanimity of that otherwoman whose presence was now forever between them.
Justine made no sign. She resumed her work as though unconscious of anychange; but whereas in the past they had always found pretexts forseeking each other out, to discuss the order of the day's work, ormerely to warm their hearts by a rapid word or two, now each went aseparate way, sometimes not
meeting till they regained the house atnight-fall.
And as the weeks passed she began to understand that, by a strangeinversion of probability, the relation between Amherst and herself wasto be the means of holding her to her compact with Mr. Langhope--ifindeed it were not nearer the truth to say that it had made such acompact unnecessary. Amherst had done his best to take up their lifetogether as though there had been no break in it; but slowly the factwas being forced on her that by remaining with him she was subjectinghim to intolerable suffering--was coming to be the personification ofthe very thoughts and associations from which he struggled to escape.Happily her promptness of action had preserved Westmore to him, and inWestmore she believed that he would in time find a refuge from even thememory of what he was now enduring. But meanwhile her presence kept thethought alive; and, had every other incentive lost its power, this wouldhave been enough to sustain her. Fate had, ironically enough, furnishedher with an unanswerable reason for leaving Amherst; the impossibilityof their keeping up such a relation as now existed between them wouldsoon become too patent to be denied.
Meanwhile, as summer approached, she knew that external conditions wouldalso call upon her to act. The visible signal for her withdrawal wouldbe Cicely's next visit to Westmore. The child's birthday fell in earlyJune; and Amherst, some months previously, had asked that she should bepermitted to spend it at Hanaford, and that it should be chosen as thedate for the opening of the first model cottages at Hopewood.
It was Justine who had originated the idea of associating Cicely'sanniversaries with some significant moment in the annals of the millcolony; and struck by the happy suggestion, he had at once appliedhimself to hastening on the work at Hopewood. The eagerness of bothAmherst and Justine that Cicely should be identified with the developinglife of Westmore had been one of the chief influences in reconciling Mr.Langhope to his son-in-law's second marriage. Husband and wife hadalways made it clear that they regarded themselves as the mere trusteesof the Westmore revenues, and that Cicely's name should, as early aspossible, be associated with every measure taken for the welfare of thepeople. But now, as Justine knew, the situation was changed; and Cicelywould not be allowed to come to Hanaford until she herself had left it.The manifold threads of divination that she was perpetually throwing outin Amherst's presence told her, without word or sign on his part, thathe also awaited Cicely's birthday as a determining date in their lives.He spoke confidently, and as a matter of course, of Mr. Langhope'sbringing his grand-daughter at the promised time; but Justine could heara note of challenge in his voice, as though he felt that Mr. Langhope'ssincerity had not yet been put to the test.
As the time drew nearer it became more difficult for her to decide justhow she should take the step she had determined on. She had no materialanxiety for the future, for although she did not mean to accept a pennyfrom her husband after she had left him, she knew it would be easy forher to take up her nursing again; and she knew also that her hospitalconnections would enable her to find work in a part of the country farenough distant to remove her entirely from his life. But she had not yetbeen able to invent a reason for leaving that should be convincingenough to satisfy him, without directing his suspicions to the truth. Asshe revolved the question she suddenly recalled an exclamation ofAmherst's--a word spoken as they entered Mr. Langhope's door, on thefatal afternoon when she had found Wyant's letter awaiting her.
"There's nothing you can't make people believe, you little Jesuit!"
She had laughed in pure joy at his praise of her; for every banteringphrase had then been a caress. But now the words returned with asinister meaning. She knew they were true as far as Amherst wasconcerned: in the arts of casuistry and equivocation a child could haveoutmatched him, and she had only to exert her will to dupe him as deeplyas she pleased. Well! the task was odious, but it was needful: it wasthe bitterest part of her expiation that she must deceive him once moreto save him from the results of her former deception. This decision oncereached, every nerve in her became alert for an opportunity to do thething and have it over; so that, whenever they were alone together, shewas in an attitude of perpetual tension, her whole mind drawn up for itsfinal spring.
The decisive word came, one evening toward the end of May, in the formof an allusion on Amherst's part to Cicely's approaching visit. Husbandand wife were seated in the drawing-room after dinner, he with a book inhand, she bending, as usual, over the needlework which served at once asa pretext for lowered eyes, and as a means of disguising her fixedpreoccupation.
"Have you worked out a plan?" he asked, laying down his book. "Itoccurred to me that it would be rather a good idea if we began with asort of festivity for the kids at the day nursery. You could take Cicelythere early, and I could bring out Mr. Langhope after luncheon. Thewhole performance would probably tire him too much."
Justine listened with suspended thread. "Yes--that seems a good plan."
"Will you see about the details, then? You know it's only a week off."
"Yes, I know." She hesitated, and then took the spring. "I ought totell you John--that I--I think I may not be here...."
He raised his head abruptly, and she saw the blood mount under his fairskin. "Not be here?" he exclaimed.
She met his look as steadily as she could. "I think of going away forawhile."
"Going away? Where? What is the matter--are you not well?"
There was her pretext--he had found it for her! Why should she notsimply plead ill-health? Afterward she would find a way of elaboratingthe details and making them plausible. But suddenly, as she was about tospeak, there came to her the feeling which, up to one fatal moment intheir lives, had always ruled their intercourse--the feeling that theremust be truth, and absolute truth, between them. Absolute, indeed, itcould never be again, since he must never know of the condition exactedby Mr. Langhope; but that, at the moment, seemed almost a secondarymotive compared to the deeper influences that were inexorably forcingthem apart. At any rate, she would trump up no trivial excuse for thestep she had resolved on; there should be truth, if not the whole truth,in this last decisive hour between them.
"Yes; I am quite well--at least my body is," she said quietly. "But I amtired, perhaps; my mind has been going round too long in the samecircle." She paused for a brief space, and then, raising her head, andlooking him straight in the eyes: "Has it not been so with you?" sheasked.
The question seemed to startle Amherst. He rose from his chair and tooka few steps toward the hearth, where a small fire was crumbling intoembers. He turned his back to it, resting an arm on the mantel-shelf;then he said, in a somewhat unsteady tone: "I thought we had agreed notto speak of all that again."
Justine shook her head with a fugitive half-smile. "I made no suchagreement. And besides, what is the use, when we can always hear eachother's thoughts speak, and they speak of nothing else?"
Amherst's brows darkened. "It is not so with mine," he began; but sheraised her hand with a silencing gesture.
"I know you have tried your best that it should not be so; and perhapsyou have succeeded better than I. But I am tired, horribly tired--I wantto get away from everything!"
She saw a look of pain in his eyes. He continued to lean against themantel-shelf, his head slightly lowered, his unseeing gaze fixed on aremote scroll in the pattern of the carpet; then he said in a low tone:"I can only repeat again what I have said before--that I understand whyyou did what you did."
"Thank you," she answered, in the same tone.
There was another pause, for she could not trust herself to go onspeaking; and presently he asked, with a tinge of bitterness in hisvoice: "That does not satisfy you?"
She hesitated. "It satisfies me as much as it does you--and no more,"she replied at length.
He looked up hastily. "What do you mean?"
"Just what I say. We can neither of us go on living on thatunderstanding just at present." She rose as she spoke, and crossed overto the hearth. "I want to go back to my nursing--to go out to Michigan,to a tow
n where I spent a few months the year before I first came toHanaford. I have friends there, and can get work easily. And you cantell people that I was ill and needed a change."
It had been easier to say than she had imagined, and her voice held itsclear note till the end; but when she had ceased, the whole room beganto reverberate with her words, and through the clashing they made in herbrain she felt a sudden uncontrollable longing that they should provokein him a cry of protest, of resistance. Oh, if he refused to let hergo--if he caught her to him, and defied the world to part them--whatthen of her pledge to Mr. Langhope, what then of her resolve to pay thepenalty alone?
But in the space of a heart-beat she knew that peril--that longed-forperil!--was past. Her husband had remained silent--he neither movedtoward her nor looked at her; and she felt in every slackening nervethat in the end he would let her go.
The Fruit of the Tree Page 39