The Fruit of the Tree: Chapter 10

Chapter 10

"AH, Mrs. Dressel, we were on the lookout for you--waiting for the
curtain to rise. Your friend Miss Brent? Juliana, Mrs. Dressel's friend
Miss Brent----"

Near the brilliantly-striped marquee that formed the axis of the Gaines
garden-parties, Mr. Halford Gaines, a few paces from his wife and
daughters, stood radiating a royal welcome on the stream of visitors
pouring across the lawn. It was only to eyes perverted by a different
social perspective that there could be any doubt as to the importance
of the Gaines entertainments. To Hanaford itself they were epoch-making;
and if any rebellious spirit had cherished a doubt of the fact, it would
have been quelled by the official majesty of Mr. Gaines's frock-coat and
the comprehensive cordiality of his manner.

There were moments when New York hung like a disquieting cloud on the
social horizon of Mrs. Gaines and her daughters; but to Halford Gaines
Hanaford was all in all. As an exponent of the popular and patriotic
"good-enough-for-me" theory he stood in high favour at the Hanaford
Club, where a too-keen consciousness of the metropolis was alternately
combated by easy allusion and studied omission, and where the unsettled
fancies of youth were chastened and steadied by the reflection that, if
Hanaford was good enough for Halford Gaines, it must offer opportunities
commensurate with the largest ideas of life.

Never did Mr. Gaines's manner bear richer witness to what could be
extracted from Hanaford than when he was in the act of applying to it
the powerful pressure of his hospitality. The resultant essence was so
bubbling with social exhilaration that, to its producer at any rate, its
somewhat mixed ingredients were lost in one highly flavoured draught.
Under ordinary circumstances no one discriminated more keenly than Mr.
Gaines between different shades of social importance; but any one who
was entertained by him was momentarily ennobled by the fact, and not all
the anxious telegraphy of his wife and daughters could, for instance,
recall to him that the striking young woman in Mrs. Dressel's wake was
only some obscure prot�g�e, whom it was odd of Effie to have brought,
and whose presence was quite unnecessary to emphasize.

"Juliana, Miss Brent tells me she has never seen our roses. Oh, there
are other roses in Hanaford, Miss Brent; I don't mean to imply that no
one else attempts them; but unless you can afford to give _carte
blanche_ to your man--and mine happens to be something of a
specialist...well, if you'll come with me, I'll let them speak for
themselves. I always say that if people want to know what we can do they
must come and see--they'll never find out from _me_!"

A more emphatic signal from his wife arrested Mr. Gaines as he was in
the act of leading Miss Brent away.

"Eh?--What? The Amhersts and Mrs. Ansell? You must excuse me then, I'm
afraid--but Westy shall take you. Westy, my boy, it's an ill-wind.... I
want you to show this young lady our roses." And Mr. Gaines, with
mingled reluctance and satisfaction, turned away to receive the most
important guests of the day.

It had not needed his father's summons to draw the expert Westy to Miss
Brent: he was already gravitating toward her, with the nonchalance bred
of cosmopolitan successes, but with a directness of aim due also to his
larger opportunities of comparison.

"The roses will do," he explained, as he guided her through the
increasing circle of guests about his mother; and in answer to Justine's
glance of enquiry: "To get you away, I mean. They're not much in
themselves, you know; but everything of the governor's always begins
with a capital letter."

"Oh, but these roses deserve to," Justine exclaimed, as they paused
under the evergreen archway at the farther end of the lawn.

"I don't know--not if you've been in England," Westy murmured, watching
furtively for the impression produced, on one who had presumably not, by
the great blush of colour massed against its dusky background of clipped
evergreens.

Justine smiled. "I _have_ been--but I've been in the slums since; in
horrible places that the least of those flowers would have lighted up
like a lamp."

Westy's guarded glance imprudently softened. "It's the beastliest kind
of a shame, your ever having had to do such work----"

"Oh, _had_ to?" she flashed back at him disconcertingly. "It was my
choice, you know: there was a time when I couldn't live without it.
Philanthropy is one of the subtlest forms of self-indulgence."

Westy met this with a vague laugh. If a chap who was as knowing as the
devil _did_, once in a way, indulge himself in the luxury of talking
recklessly to a girl with exceptional eyes, it was rather upsetting to
discover in those eyes no consciousness of the risk he had taken!

"But I _am_ rather tired of it now," she continued, and his look grew
guarded again. After all, they were all the same--except in that
particular matter of the eyes. At the thought, he risked another look,
hung on the sharp edge of betrayal, and was snatched back, not by the
manly instinct of self-preservation, but by some imp of mockery lurking
in the depths that lured him.

He recovered his balance and took refuge in a tone of worldly ease. "I
saw a chap the other day who said he knew you when you were at Saint
Elizabeth's--wasn't that the name of your hospital?"

Justine assented. "One of the doctors, I suppose. Where did you meet
him?"

Ah, _now_ she should see! He summoned his utmost carelessness of tone.
"Down on Long Island last week--I was spending Sunday with the
Amhersts." He held up the glittering fact to her, and watched for the
least little blink of awe; but her lids never trembled. It was a
confession of social blindness which painfully negatived Mrs. Dressel's
hint that she knew the Amhersts; if she had even known _of_ them, she
could not so fatally have missed his point.

"Long Island?" She drew her brows together in puzzled retrospection. "I
wonder if it could have been Stephen Wyant? I heard he had taken over
his uncle's practice somewhere near New York."

"Wyant--that's the name. He's the doctor at Clifton, the nearest town to
the Amhersts' place. Little Cicely had a cold--Cicely Westmore, you
know--a small cousin of mine, by the way--" he switched a rose-branch
loftily out of her path, explaining, as she moved on, that Cicely was
the daughter of Mrs. Amherst's first marriage to Richard Westmore.
"That's the way I happened to see this Dr. Wyant. Bessy--Mrs.
Amherst--asked him to stop to luncheon, after he'd seen the kid. He
seems rather a discontented sort of a chap--grumbling at not having a
New York practice. I should have thought he had rather a snug berth,
down there at Lynbrook, with all those swells to dose."

Justine smiled. "Dr. Wyant is ambitious, and swells don't have as
interesting diseases as poor people. One gets tired of giving them bread
pills for imaginary ailments. But Dr. Wyant is not strong himself and I
fancy a country practice is better for him than hard work in town."

"You think him clever though, do you?" Westy enquired absently. He was
already bored with the subject of the Long Island doctor, and vexed at
the lack of perception that led his companion to show more concern in
the fortunes of a country practitioner than in the fact of his own visit
to the Amhersts; but the topic was a safe one, and it was agreeable to
see how her face kindled when she was interested.

Justine mused on his question. "I think he has very great promise--which
he is almost certain not to fulfill," she answered with a sigh which
seemed to Westy's anxious ear to betray a more than professional
interest in the person referred to.

"Oh, come now--why not? With the Amhersts to give him a start--I heard
my cousin recommending him to a lot of people the other day----"

"Oh, he may become a fashionable doctor," Justine assented
indifferently; to which her companion rejoined, with a puzzled stare:
"That's just what I mean--with Bessy backing him!"

"Has Mrs. Amherst become such a power, then?" Justine asked, taking up
the coveted theme just as he despaired of attracting her to it.

"My cousin?" he stretched the two syllables to the cracking-point.
"Well, she's awfully rich, you know; and there's nobody smarter. Don't
you think so?"

"I don't know; it's so long since I've seen her."

He brightened. "You _did_ know her, then?" But the discovery made her
obtuseness the more inexplicable!

"Oh, centuries ago: in another world."

"_Centuries_--I like that!" Westy gallantly protested, his ardour
kindling as she swam once more within his social ken. "And Amherst? You
know him too, I suppose? By Jove, here he is now----"

He signalled a tall figure strolling slowly toward them with bent head
and brooding gaze. Justine's eye had retained a vivid image of the man
with whom, scarcely three years earlier, she had lived through a moment
of such poignant intimacy, and she recognized at once his lean outline,
and the keen spring of his features, still veiled by the same look of
inward absorption. She noticed, as he raised his hat in response to
Westy Gaines's greeting, that the vertical lines between his brows had
deepened; and a moment later she was aware that this change was the
visible token of others which went deeper than the fact of his good
clothes and his general air of leisure and well-being--changes
perceptible to her only in the startled sense of how prosperity had aged
him.

"Hallo, Amherst--trying to get under cover?" Westy jovially accosted
him, with a significant gesture toward the crowded lawn from which the
new-comer had evidently fled. "I was just telling Miss Brent that this
is the safest place on these painful occasions--Oh, confound it, it's
not as safe as I thought! Here's one of my sisters making for me!"

There ensued a short conflict of words, before his feeble flutter of
resistance was borne down by a resolute Miss Gaines who, as she swept
him back to the marquee, cried out to Amherst that her mother was asking
for him too; and then Justine had time to observe that her remaining
companion had no intention of responding to his hostess's appeal.

Westy, in naming her, had laid just enough stress on the name to let it
serve as a reminder or an introduction, as circumstances might decide,
and she saw that Amherst, roused from his abstraction by the proffered
clue, was holding his hand out doubtfully.

"I think we haven't met for some years," he said.

Justine smiled. "I have a better reason than you for remembering the
exact date;" and in response to his look of surprise she added: "You
made me commit a professional breach of faith, and I've never known
since whether to be glad or sorry."

Amherst still bent on her the gaze which seemed to find in external
details an obstacle rather than a help to recognition; but suddenly his
face cleared. "It was you who told me the truth about poor Dillon! I
couldn't imagine why I seemed to see you in such a different
setting...."

"Oh, I'm disguised as a lady this afternoon," she said smiling. "But I'm
glad you saw through the disguise."

He smiled back at her. "Are you? Why?"

"It seems to make it--if it's so transparent--less of a sham, less of a
dishonesty," she began impulsively, and then paused again, a little
annoyed at the overemphasis of her words. Why was she explaining and
excusing herself to this stranger? Did she propose to tell him next that
she had borrowed her dress from Effie Dressel? To cover her confusion
she went on with a slight laugh: "But you haven't told me."

"What was I to tell you?"

"Whether to be glad or sorry that I broke my vow and told the truth
about Dillon."

They were standing face to face in the solitude of the garden-walk,
forgetful of everything but the sudden surprised sense of intimacy that
had marked their former brief communion. Justine had raised her eyes
half-laughingly to Amherst, but they dropped before the unexpected
seriousness of his.

"Why do you want to know?" he asked.

She made an effort to sustain the note of pleasantry.

"Well--it might, for instance, determine my future conduct. You see I'm
still a nurse, and such problems are always likely to present
themselves."

"Ah, then don't!"

"Don't?"

"I mean--" He hesitated a moment, reaching up to break a rose from the
branch that tapped his shoulder. "I was only thinking what risks we run
when we scramble into the chariot of the gods and try to do the driving.
Be passive--be passive, and you'll be happier!"

"Oh, as to that--!" She swept it aside with one of her airy motions.
"But Dillon, for instance--would _he_ have been happier if I'd been
passive?"

Amherst seemed to ponder. "There again--how can one tell?"

"And the risk's not worth taking?"

"No!"

She paused, and they looked at each other again. "Do you mean that
seriously, I wonder? Do you----"

"Act on it myself? God forbid! The gods drive so badly. There's poor
Dillon...he happened to be in their way...as we all are at times." He
pulled himself up, and went on in a matter-of-fact tone: "In Dillon's
case, however, my axioms don't apply. When my wife heard the truth she
was, of course, immensely kind to him; and if it hadn't been for you she
might never have known."

Justine smiled. "I think you would have found out--I was only the humble
instrument. But now--" she hesitated--"now you must be able to do so
much--"

Amherst lifted his head, and she saw the colour rise under his fair
skin. "Out at Westmore? You've never been there since? Yes--my wife has
made some changes; but it's all so problematic--and one would have to
live here...."

"You don't, then?"

He answered by an imperceptible shrug. "Of course I'm here often; and
she comes now and then. But the journey's tiresome, and it is not always
easy for her to get away." He checked himself, and Justine saw that he,
in turn, was suddenly conscious of the incongruity of explaining and
extenuating his personal situation to a stranger. "But then we're _not_
strangers!" a voice in her exulted, just as he added, with an
embarrassed attempt to efface and yet justify his moment of expansion:
"That reminds me--I think you know my wife. I heard her asking Mrs.
Dressel about you. She wants so much to see you."

The transition had been effected, at the expense of dramatic interest,
but to the obvious triumph of social observances; and to Justine, after
all, regaining at his side the group about the marquee, the interest was
not so much diminished as shifted to the no less suggestive problem of
studying the friend of her youth in the unexpected character of John
Amherst's wife.

Meanwhile, however, during the brief transit across the Gaines
greensward, her thoughts were still busy with Amherst. She had seen at
once that the peculiar sense of intimacy reawakened by their meeting had
been chilled and deflected by her first allusion to the topic which had
previously brought them together: Amherst had drawn back as soon as she
named the mills. What could be the cause of his reluctance? When they
had last met, the subject burned within him: her being in actual fact a
stranger had not, then, been an obstacle to his confidences. Now that he
was master at Westmore it was plain that another tone became him--that
his situation necessitated a greater reserve; but her enquiry did not
imply the least wish to overstep this restriction: it merely showed her
remembrance of his frankly-avowed interest in the operatives. Justine
was struck by the fact that so natural an allusion should put him on the
defensive. She did not for a moment believe that he had lost his
interest in the mills; and that his point of view should have shifted
with the fact of ownership she rejected as an equally superficial
reading of his character. The man with whom she had talked at Dillon's
bedside was one in whom the ruling purposes had already shaped
themselves, and to whom life, in whatever form it came, must henceforth
take their mould. As she reached this point in her analysis, it occurred
to her that his shrinking from the subject might well imply not
indifference, but a deeper preoccupation: a preoccupation for some
reason suppressed and almost disavowed, yet sustaining the more
intensely its painful hidden life. From this inference it was but a leap
of thought to the next--that the cause of the change must be sought
outside of himself, in some external influence strong enough to modify
the innate lines of his character. And where could such an influence be
more obviously sought than in the marriage which had transformed the
assistant manager of the Westmore Mills not, indeed, into their
owner--that would rather have tended to simplify the problem--but into
the husband of Mrs. Westmore? After all, the mills were Bessy's--and for
a farther understanding of the case it remained to find out what manner
of person Bessy had become.

Justine's first impression, as her friend's charming arms received
her--with an eagerness of welcome not lost on the suspended judgment of
feminine Hanaford--the immediate impression was of a gain of emphasis,
of individuality, as though the fluid creature she remembered had belied
her prediction, and run at last into a definite mould. Yes--Bessy had
acquired an outline: a graceful one, as became her early promise, though
with, perhaps, a little more sharpness of edge than her youthful texture
had promised. But the side she turned to her friend was still all
softness--had in it a hint of the old pliancy, the impulse to lean and
enlace, that at once woke in Justine the corresponding instinct of
guidance and protection, so that their first kiss, before a word was
spoken, carried the two back to the precise relation in which their
school-days had left them. So easy a reversion to the past left no room
for the sense of subsequent changes by which such reunions are sometimes
embarrassed. Justine's sympathies had, instinctively, and almost at
once, transferred themselves to Bessy's side--passing over at a leap
the pained recognition that there _were_ sides already--and Bessy had
gathered up Justine into the circle of gentle self-absorption which left
her very dimly aware of any distinctive characteristic in her friends
except that of their affection for herself--since she asked only, as she
appealingly put it, that they should all be "dreadfully fond" of her.

"And I've wanted you so often, Justine: you're the only clever person
I'm not afraid of, because your cleverness always used to make things
clear instead of confusing them. I've asked so many people about
you--but I never heard a word till just the other day--wasn't it
odd?--when our new doctor at Rushton happened to say that he knew you.
I've been rather unwell lately--nervous and tired, and sleeping
badly--and he told me I ought to keep perfectly quiet, and be under the
care of a nurse who could make me do as she chose: just such a nurse as
a wonderful Miss Brent he had known at St. Elizabeth's, whose patients
obeyed her as if she'd been the colonel of a regiment. His description
made me laugh, it reminded me so much of the way you used to make me do
what you wanted at the convent--and then it suddenly occurred to me that
I had heard of you having gone in for nursing, and we compared notes,
and I found it was really you! Wasn't it odd that we should discover
each other in that way? I daresay we might have passed in the street
and never known it--I'm sure I must be horribly changed...."

Thus Bessy discoursed, in the semi-isolation to which, under an
overarching beech-tree, the discretion of their hostess had allowed the
two friends to withdraw for the freer exchange of confidences. There
was, at first sight, nothing in her aspect to bear out Mrs. Amherst's
plaintive allusion to her health, but Justine, who knew that she had
lost a baby a few months previously, assumed that the effect of this
shock still lingered, though evidently mitigated by a reviving interest
in pretty clothes and the other ornamental accessories of life.
Certainly Bessy Amherst had grown into the full loveliness which her
childhood promised. She had the kind of finished prettiness that
declares itself early, holds its own through the awkward transitions of
girlhood, and resists the strain of all later vicissitudes, as though
miraculously preserved in some clear medium impenetrable to the wear and
tear of living.

"You absurd child! You've not changed a bit except to grow more so!"
Justine laughed, paying amused tribute to the childish craving for "a
compliment" that still betrayed itself in Bessy's eyes.

"Well, _you_ have, then, Justine--you've grown extraordinarily
handsome!"

"That _is_ extraordinary of me, certainly," the other acknowledged
gaily. "But then think what room for improvement there was--and how
much time I've had to improve in!"

"It is a long time, isn't it?" Bessy assented. "I feel so intimate,
still, with the old Justine of the convent, and I don't know the new one
a bit. Just think--I've a great girl of my own, almost as old as we were
when we went to the Sacred Heart: But perhaps you don't know anything
about me either. You see, I married again two years ago, and my poor
baby died last March...so I have only Cicely. It was such a
disappointment--I wanted a boy dreadfully, and I understand little
babies so much better than a big girl like Cicely.... Oh, dear, here is
Juliana Gaines bringing up some more tiresome people! It's such a bore,
but John says I must know them all. Well, thank goodness we've only one
more day in this dreadful place--and of course I shall see you, dear,
before we go...."

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