The Fruit of the Tree: Chapter 11

Chapter 11

AFTER conducting Miss Brent to his wife, John Amherst, by the exercise
of considerable strategic skill, had once more contrived to detach
himself from the throng on the lawn, and, regaining a path in the
shrubbery, had taken refuge on the verandah of the house.

Here, under the shade of the awning, two ladies were seated in a
seclusion agreeably tempered by the distant strains of the Hanaford
band, and by the shifting prospect of the groups below them.

"Ah, here he is now!" the younger of the two exclaimed, turning on
Amherst the smile of intelligence that Mrs. Eustace Ansell was in the
habit of substituting for the idle preliminaries of conversation. "We
were not talking of you, though," she added as Amherst took the seat to
which his mother beckoned him, "but of Bessy--which, I suppose, is
almost as indiscreet."

She added the last phrase after an imperceptible pause, and as if in
deprecation of the hardly more perceptible frown which, at the mention
of his wife's name, had deepened the lines between Amherst's brows.

"Indiscreet of his own mother and his wife's friend?" Mrs. Amherst
protested, laying her trimly-gloved hand on her son's arm; while the
latter, with his eyes on her companion, said slowly: "Mrs. Ansell knows
that indiscretion is the last fault of which her friends are likely to
accuse her."

"_Raison de plus_, you mean?" she laughed, meeting squarely the
challenge that passed between them under Mrs. Amherst's puzzled gaze.
"Well, if I take advantage of my reputation for discretion to meddle a
little now and then, at least I do so in a good cause. I was just saying
how much I wish that you would take Bessy to Europe; and I am so sure
of my cause, in this case, that I am going to leave it to your mother to
give you my reasons."

She rose as she spoke, not with any sign of haste or embarrassment, but
as if gracefully recognizing the desire of mother and son to be alone
together; but Amherst, rising also, made a motion to detain her.

"No one else will be able to put your reasons half so convincingly," he
said with a slight smile, "and I am sure my mother would much rather be
spared the attempt."

Mrs. Ansell met the smile as freely as she had met the challenge. "My
dear Lucy," she rejoined, laying, as she reseated herself, a light
caress on Mrs. Amherst's hand, "I'm sorry to be flattered at your
expense, but it's not in human nature to resist such an appeal. You
see," she added, raising her eyes to Amherst, "how sure I am of
myself--and of _you_, when you've heard me."

"Oh, John is always ready to hear one," his mother murmured innocently.

"Well, I don't know that I shall even ask him to do as much as that--I'm
so sure, after all, that my suggestion carries its explanation with it."

There was a moment's pause, during which Amherst let his eyes wander
absently over the dissolving groups on the lawn.

"The suggestion that I should take Bessy to Europe?" He paused again.
"When--next autumn?"

"No: now--at once. On a long honeymoon."

He frowned slightly at the last word, passing it by to revert to the
direct answer to his question.

"At once? No--I can't see that the suggestion carries its explanation
with it."

Mrs. Ansell looked at him hesitatingly. She was conscious of the
ill-chosen word that still reverberated between them, and the unwonted
sense of having blundered made her, for the moment, less completely
mistress of herself.

"Ah, you'll see farther presently--" She rose again, unfurling her lace
sunshade, as if to give a touch of definiteness to her action. "It's
not, after all," she added, with a sweet frankness, "a case for
argument, and still less for persuasion. My reasons are excellent--I
should insist on putting them to you myself if they were not! But
they're so good that I can leave you to find them out--and to back them
up with your own, which will probably be a great deal better."

She summed up with a light nod, which included both Amherst and his
mother, and turning to descend the verandah steps, waved a signal to Mr.
Langhope, who was limping disconsolately toward the house.

"What has she been saying to you, mother?" Amherst asked, returning to
his seat beside his mother.

Mrs. Amherst replied by a shake of her head and a raised forefinger of
reproval. "Now, Johnny, I won't answer a single question till you smooth
out those lines between your eyes."

Her son relaxed his frown to smile back at her. "Well, dear, there have
to be some wrinkles in every family, and as you absolutely refuse to
take your share--" His eyes rested affectionately on the frosty sparkle
of her charming old face, which had, in its setting of recovered
prosperity, the freshness of a sunny winter morning, when the very snow
gives out a suggestion of warmth.

He remembered how, on the evening of his dismissal from the mills, he
had paused on the threshold of their sitting-room to watch her a moment
in the lamplight, and had thought with bitter compunction of the fresh
wrinkle he was about to add to the lines about her eyes. The three years
which followed had effaced that wrinkle and veiled the others in a tardy
bloom of well-being. From the moment of turning her back on Westmore,
and establishing herself in the pretty little house at Hanaford which
her son's wife had placed at her disposal, Mrs. Amherst had shed all
traces of the difficult years; and the fact that his marriage had
enabled him to set free, before it was too late, the pent-up springs of
her youthfulness, sometimes seemed to Amherst the clearest gain in his
life's confused total of profit and loss. It was, at any rate, the sense
of Bessy's share in the change that softened his voice when he spoke of
her to his mother.

"Now, then, if I present a sufficiently unruffled surface, let us go
back to Mrs. Ansell--for I confess that her mysterious reasons are not
yet apparent to me."

Mrs. Amherst looked deprecatingly at her son. "Maria Ansell is devoted
to you too, John----"

"Of course she is! It's her _r�le_ to be devoted to
everybody--especially to her enemies."

"Her enemies?"

"Oh, I didn't intend any personal application. But why does she want me
to take Bessy abroad?"

"She and Mr. Langhope think that Bessy is not looking well."

Amherst paused, and the frown showed itself for a moment. "What do _you_
think, mother?"

"I hadn't noticed it myself: Bessy seems to me prettier than ever. But
perhaps she has less colour--and she complains of not sleeping. Maria
thinks she still frets over the baby."

Amherst made an impatient gesture. "Is Europe the only panacea?"

"You should consider, John, that Bessy is used to change and amusement.
I think you sometimes forget that other people haven't your faculty of
absorbing themselves in a single interest. And Maria says that the new
doctor at Clifton, whom they seem to think so clever, is very anxious
that Bessy should go to Europe this summer."

"No doubt; and so is every one else: I mean her father and old
Tredegar--and your friend Mrs. Ansell not least."

Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright black eyes to his. "Well, then--if they
all think she needs it----"

"Good heavens, if travel were what she needed!--Why, we've never stopped
travelling since we married. We've been everywhere on the globe except
at Hanaford--this is her second visit here in three years!" He rose and
took a rapid turn across the deserted verandah. "It's not because her
health requires it--it's to get me away from Westmore, to prevent things
being done there that ought to be done!" he broke out vehemently,
halting again before his mother.

The aged pink faded from Mrs. Amherst's face, but her eyes retained
their lively glitter. "To prevent things being done? What a strange
thing to say!"

"I shouldn't have said it if I hadn't seen you falling under Mrs.
Ansell's spell."

His mother had a gesture which showed from whom he had inherited his
impulsive movements. "Really, my son--!" She folded her hands, and added
after a pause of self-recovery: "If you mean that I have ever attempted
to interfere----"

"No, no: but when they pervert things so damnably----"

"John!"

He dropped into his chair again, and pushed the hair from his forehead
with a groan.

"Well, then--put it that they have as much right to their view as I
have: I only want you to see what it is. Whenever I try to do anything
at Westmore--to give a real start to the work that Bessy and I planned
together--some pretext is found to stop it: to pack us off to the ends
of the earth, to cry out against reducing her income, to encourage her
in some new extravagance to which the work at the mills must be
sacrificed!"

Mrs. Amherst, growing pale under this outbreak, assured herself by a
nervous backward glance that their privacy was still uninvaded; then her
eyes returned to her son's face.

"John--are you sure you're not sacrificing your wife to the mills?"

He grew pale in turn, and they looked at each other for a moment without
speaking.

"You see it as they do, then?" he rejoined with a discouraged sigh.

"I see it as any old woman would, who had my experiences to look back
to."

"Mother!" he exclaimed.

She smiled composedly. "Do you think I mean that as a reproach? That's
because men will never understand women--least of all, sons their
mothers. No real mother wants to come first; she puts her son's career
ahead of everything. But it's different with a wife--and a wife as much
in love as Bessy."

Amherst looked away. "I should have thought that was a reason----"

"That would reconcile her to being set aside, to counting only second in
your plans?"

"They were _her_ plans when we married!"

"Ah, my dear--!" She paused on that, letting her shrewd old glance, and
all the delicate lines of experience in her face, supply what farther
comment the ineptitude of his argument invited.

He took the full measure of her meaning, receiving it in a baffled
silence that continued as she rose and gathered her lace mantle about
her, as if to signify that their confidences could not, on such an
occasion, be farther prolonged without singularity. Then he stood up
also and joined her, resting his hand on hers while she leaned on the
verandah rail.

"Poor mother! And I've kept you to myself all this time, and spoiled
your good afternoon."

"No, dear; I was a little tired, and had slipped away to be quiet." She
paused, and then went on, persuasively giving back his pressure: "I know
how you feel about doing your duty, John; but now that things are so
comfortably settled, isn't it a pity to unsettle them?"

* * * * *

Amherst had intended, on leaving his mother, to rejoin Bessy, whom he
could still discern, on the lawn, in absorbed communion with Miss Brent;
but after what had passed it seemed impossible, for the moment, to
recover the garden-party tone, and he made his escape through the house
while a trio of Cuban singers, who formed the crowning number of the
entertainment, gathered the company in a denser circle about their
guitars.

As he walked on aimlessly under the deep June shadows of Maplewood
Avenue his mother's last words formed an ironical accompaniment to his
thoughts. "Now that things are comfortably settled--" he knew so well
what that elastic epithet covered! Himself, for instance, ensconced in
the impenetrable prosperity of his wonderful marriage; herself too
(unconsciously, dear soul!), so happily tucked away in a cranny of that
new and spacious life, and no more able to conceive why existing
conditions should be disturbed than the bird in the eaves understands
why the house should be torn down. Well--he had learned at last what his
experience with his poor, valiant, puzzled mother might have taught him:
that one must never ask from women any view but the personal one, any
measure of conduct but that of their own pains and pleasures. She,
indeed, had borne undauntedly enough the brunt of their earlier trials;
but that was merely because, as she said, the mother's instinct bade her
heap all her private hopes on the great devouring altar of her son's
ambition; it was not because she had ever, in the very least, understood
or sympathized with his aims.

And Bessy--? Perhaps if their little son had lived she might in turn
have obeyed the world-old instinct of self-effacement--but now! He
remembered with an intenser self-derision that, not even in the first
surprise of his passion, had he deluded himself with the idea that Bessy
Westmore was an exception to her sex. He had argued rather that, being
only a lovelier product of the common mould, she would abound in the
adaptabilities and pliancies which the lords of the earth have seen fit
to cultivate in their companions. She would care for his aims because
they were his. During their precipitate wooing, and through the first
brief months of marriage, this profound and original theory had been
gratifyingly confirmed; then its perfect surface had begun to show a
flaw. Amherst had always conveniently supposed that the poet's line
summed up the good woman's rule of ethics: _He for God only, she for God
in him._ It was for the god in him, surely, that she had loved him: for
that first glimpse of an "ampler ether, a diviner air" that he had
brought into her cramped and curtained life. He could never, now, evoke
that earlier delusion without feeling on its still-tender surface the
keen edge of Mrs. Ansell's smile. She, no doubt, could have told him at
any time why Bessy had married him: it was for his _beaux yeux_, as Mrs.
Ansell would have put it--because he was young, handsome, persecuted, an
ardent lover if not a subtle one--because Bessy had met him at the fatal
moment, because her family had opposed the marriage--because, in brief,
the gods, that day, may have been a little short of amusement. Well,
they were having their laugh out now--there were moments when high
heaven seemed to ring with it....

With these thoughts at his heels Amherst strode on, overtaken now and
again by the wheels of departing guests from the garden-party, and
knowing, as they passed him, what was in their minds--envy of his
success, admiration of his cleverness in achieving it, and a little
half-contemptuous pity for his wife, who, with her wealth and looks,
might have done so much better. Certainly, if the case could have been
put to Hanaford--the Hanaford of the Gaines garden-party--it would have
sided with Bessy to a voice. And how much justice was there in what he
felt would have been the unanimous verdict of her class? Was his mother
right in hinting that he was sacrificing Bessy to the mills? But the
mills _were_ Bessy--at least he had thought so when he married her!
They were her particular form of contact with life, the expression of
her relation to her fellow-men, her pretext, her opportunity--unless
they were merely a vast purse in which to plunge for her pin-money! He
had fancied it would rest with him to determine from which of these
stand-points she should view Westmore; and at the outset she had
enthusiastically viewed it from his. In her eager adoption of his ideas
she had made a pet of the mills, organizing the Mothers' Club, laying
out a recreation-ground on the Hopewood property, and playing with
pretty plans in water-colour for the Emergency Hospital and the building
which was to contain the night-schools, library and gymnasium; but even
these minor projects--which he had urged her to take up as a means of
learning their essential dependence on his larger scheme--were soon to
be set aside by obstacles of a material order. Bessy always wanted
money--not a great deal, but, as she reasonably put it, "enough"--and
who was to blame if her father and Mr. Tredegar, each in his different
capacity, felt obliged to point out that every philanthropic outlay at
Westmore must entail a corresponding reduction in her income? Perhaps if
she could have been oftener at Hanaford these arguments would have been
counteracted, for she was tender-hearted, and prompt to relieve such
suffering as she saw about her; but her imagination was not active, and
it was easy for her to forget painful sights when they were not under
her eye. This was perhaps--half-consciously--one of the reasons why she
avoided Hanaford; why, as Amherst exclaimed, they had been everywhere
since their marriage but to the place where their obligations called
them. There had, at any rate, always been some good excuse for not
returning there, and consequently for postponing the work of improvement
which, it was generally felt, her husband could not fitly begin till she
_had_ returned and gone over the ground with him. After their marriage,
and especially in view of the comment excited by that romantic incident,
it was impossible not to yield to her wish that they should go abroad
for a few months; then, before her confinement, the doctors had exacted
that she should be spared all fatigue and worry; and after the baby's
death Amherst had felt with her too tenderly to venture an immediate
return to unwelcome questions.

For by this time it had become clear to him that such questions were,
and always would be, unwelcome to her. As the easiest means of escaping
them, she had once more dismissed the whole problem to the vague and
tiresome sphere of "business," whence he had succeeded in detaching it
for a moment in the early days of their union. Her first husband--poor
unappreciated Westmore!--had always spared her the boredom of
"business," and Halford Gaines and Mr. Tredegar were ready to show her
the same consideration; it was part of the modern code of chivalry that
lovely woman should not be bothered about ways and means. But Bessy was
too much the wife--and the wife in love--to consent that her husband's
views on the management of the mills should be totally disregarded.
Precisely because her advisers looked unfavourably on his intervention,
she felt bound--if only in defense of her illusions--to maintain and
emphasize it. The mills were, in fact, the official "platform" on which
she had married: Amherst's devoted _r�le_ at Westmore had justified the
unconventionality of the step. And so she was committed--the more
helplessly for her dense misintelligence of both sides of the
question--to the policy of conciliating the opposing influences which
had so uncomfortably chosen to fight out their case on the field of her
poor little existence: theoretically siding with her husband, but
surreptitiously, as he well knew, giving aid and comfort to the enemy,
who were really defending her own cause.

All this Amherst saw with that cruel insight which had replaced his
former blindness. He was, in truth, more ashamed of the insight than of
the blindness: it seemed to him horribly cold-blooded to be thus
analyzing, after two years of marriage, the source of his wife's
inconsistencies. And, partly for this reason, he had put off from month
to month the final question of the future management of the mills, and
of the radical changes to be made there if his system were to prevail.
But the time had come when, if Bessy had to turn to Westmore for the
justification of her marriage, he had even more need of calling upon it
for the same service. He had not, assuredly, married her because of
Westmore; but he would scarcely have contemplated marriage with a rich
woman unless the source of her wealth had offered him some such
opportunity as Westmore presented. His special training, and the natural
bent of his mind, qualified him, in what had once seemed a predestined
manner, to help Bessy to use her power nobly, for her own uplifting as
well as for that of Westmore; and so the mills became, incongruously
enough, the plank of safety to which both clung in their sense of
impending disaster.

It was not that Amherst feared the temptation to idleness if this outlet
for his activity were cut off. He had long since found that the luxury
with which his wife surrounded him merely quickened his natural bent for
hard work and hard fare. He recalled with a touch of bitterness how he
had once regretted having separated himself from his mother's class, and
how seductive for a moment, to both mind and senses, that other life had
appeared. Well--he knew it now, and it had neither charm nor peril for
him. Capua must have been a dull place to one who had once drunk the joy
of battle. What he dreaded was not that he should learn to love the
life of ease, but that he should grow to loathe it uncontrollably, as
the symbol of his mental and spiritual bondage. And Westmore was his
safety-valve, his refuge--if he were cut off from Westmore what remained
to him? It was not only the work he had found to his hand, but the one
work for which his hand was fitted. It was his life that he was fighting
for in insisting that now at last, before the close of this
long-deferred visit to Hanaford, the question of the mills should be
faced and settled. He had made that clear to Bessy, in a scene he still
shrank from recalling; for it was of the essence of his somewhat
unbending integrity that he would not trick her into a confused
surrender to the personal influence he still possessed over her, but
must seek to convince her by the tedious process of argument and
exposition, against which she knew no defense but tears and petulance.
But he had, at any rate, gained her consent to his setting forth his
views at the meeting of directors the next morning; and meanwhile he had
meant to be extraordinarily patient and reasonable with her, till the
hint of Mrs. Ansell's stratagem produced in him a fresh reaction of
distrust.

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