The Fruit of the Tree: Chapter 20

Chapter 20

AMHERST'S morning excursions with his step-daughter and Miss Brent
renewed themselves more than once. He welcomed any pretext for escaping
from the unprofitable round of his thoughts, and these woodland
explorations, with their gay rivalry of search for some rare plant or
elusive bird, and the contact with the child's happy wonder, and with
the morning brightness of Justine's mood, gave him his only moments of
self-forgetfulness.

But the first time that Cicely's chatter carried home an echo of their
adventures, Amherst saw a cloud on his wife's face. Her resentment of
Justine's influence over the child had long since subsided, and in the
temporary absence of the governess she was glad to have Cicely amused;
but she was never quite satisfied that those about her should have
pursuits and diversions in which she did not share. Her jealousy did not
concentrate itself on her husband and Miss Brent: Amherst had never
shown any inclination for the society of other women, and if the
possibility had been suggested to her, she would probably have said that
Justine was not "in his style"--so unconscious is a pretty woman apt to
be of the versatility of masculine tastes. But Amherst saw that she felt
herself excluded from amusements in which she had no desire to join, and
of which she consequently failed to see the purpose; and he gave up
accompanying his stepdaughter.

Bessy, as if in acknowledgment of his renunciation, rose earlier in
order to prolong their rides together. Dr. Wyant had counselled her
against the fatigue of following the hounds, and she instinctively
turned their horses away from the course the hunt was likely to take;
but now and then the cry of the pack, or the flash of red on a distant
slope, sent the blood to her face and made her press her mare to a
gallop. When they escaped such encounters she showed no great zest in
the exercise, and their rides resolved themselves into a spiritless
middle-aged jog along the autumn lanes. In the early days of their
marriage the joy of a canter side by side had merged them in a community
of sensation beyond need of speech; but now that the physical spell had
passed they felt the burden of a silence that neither knew how to break.

Once only, a moment's friction galvanized these lifeless rides. It was
one morning when Bessy's wild mare Impulse, under-exercised and
over-fed, suddenly broke from her control, and would have unseated her
but for Amherst's grasp on the bridle.

"The horse is not fit for you to ride," he exclaimed, as the hot
creature, with shudders of defiance rippling her flanks, lapsed into
sullen subjection.

"It's only because I don't ride her enough," Bessy panted. "That new
groom is ruining her mouth."

"You must not ride her alone, then."

"I shall not let that man ride her."

"I say you must not ride her alone."

"It's ridiculous to have a groom at one's heels!"

"Nevertheless you must, if you ride Impulse."

Their eyes met, and she quivered and yielded like the horse. "Oh, if you
say so--" She always hugged his brief flashes of authority.

"I do say so. You promise me?"

"If you like----"

* * * * *

Amherst had made an attempt to occupy himself with the condition of
Lynbrook, one of those slovenly villages, without individual character
or the tradition of self-respect, which spring up in America on the
skirts of the rich summer colonies. But Bessy had never given Lynbrook a
thought, and he realized the futility of hoping to interest her in its
mongrel population of day-labourers and publicans so soon after his
glaring failure at Westmore. The sight of the village irritated him
whenever he passed through the Lynbrook gates, but having perforce
accepted the situation of prince consort, without voice in the
government, he tried to put himself out of relation with all the
questions which had hitherto engrossed him, and to see life simply as a
spectator. He could even conceive that, under certain conditions, there
might be compensations in the passive attitude; but unfortunately these
conditions were not such as the life at Lynbrook presented.

The temporary cessation of Bessy's week-end parties had naturally not
closed her doors to occasional visitors, and glimpses of the autumnal
animation of Long Island passed now and then across the Amhersts'
horizon. Blanche Carbury had installed herself at Mapleside, a
fashionable colony half-way between Lynbrook and Clifton, and even
Amherst, unused as he was to noting the seemingly inconsecutive
movements of idle people, could not but remark that her visits to his
wife almost invariably coincided with Ned Bowfort's cantering over
unannounced from the Hunt Club, where he had taken up his autumn
quarters.

There was something very likeable about Bowfort, to whom Amherst was
attracted by the fact that he was one of the few men of Bessy's circle
who knew what was going on in the outer world. Throughout an existence
which one divined to have been both dependent and desultory, he had
preserved a sense of wider relations and acquired a smattering of
information to which he applied his only independent faculty, that of
clear thought. He could talk intelligently and not too inaccurately of
the larger questions which Lynbrook ignored, and a gay indifference to
the importance of money seemed the crowning grace of his nature, till
Amherst suddenly learned that this attitude of detachment was generally
ascribed to the liberality of Mrs. Fenton Carbury. "Everybody knows she
married Fenton to provide for Ned," some one let fall in the course of
one of the smoking-room dissertations on which the host of Lynbrook had
such difficulty in fixing his attention; and the speaker's
matter-of-course tone, and the careless acquiescence of his hearers,
were more offensive to Amherst than the fact itself. In the first flush
of his disgust he classed the story as one of the lies bred in the
malarious air of after-dinner gossip; but gradually he saw that, whether
true or not, it had sufficient circulation to cast a shade of ambiguity
on the persons concerned. Bessy alone seemed deaf to the rumours about
her friend. There was something captivating to her in Mrs. Carbury's
slang and noise, in her defiance of decorum and contempt of criticism.
"I like Blanche because she doesn't pretend," was Bessy's vague
justification of the lady; but in reality she was under the mysterious
spell which such natures cast over the less venturesome imaginations of
their own sex.

Amherst at first tried to deaden himself to the situation, as part of
the larger coil of miseries in which he found himself; but all his
traditions were against such tolerance, and they were roused to revolt
by the receipt of a newspaper clipping, sent by an anonymous hand,
enlarging on the fact that the clandestine meetings of a fashionable
couple were being facilitated by the connivance of a Long Island
_ch�telaine_. Amherst, hot from the perusal of this paragraph, sprang
into the first train, and laid the clipping before his father-in-law,
who chanced to be passing through town on his way from the Hudson to the
Hot Springs.

Mr. Langhope, ensconced in the cushioned privacy of the reading-room at
the Amsterdam Club, where he had invited his son-in-law to meet him,
perused the article with the cool eye of the collector to whom a new
curiosity is offered.

"I suppose," he mused, "that in the time of the Pharaohs the Morning
Papyrus used to serve up this kind of thing"--and then, as the nervous
tension of his hearer expressed itself in an abrupt movement, he added,
handing back the clipping with a smile: "What do you propose to do? Kill
the editor, and forbid Blanche and Bowfort the house?"

"I mean to do something," Amherst began, suddenly chilled by the
realization that his wrath had not yet shaped itself into a definite
plan of action.

"Well, it must be that or nothing," said Mr. Langhope, drawing his stick
meditatively across his knee. "And, of course, if it's _that_, you'll
land Bessy in a devil of a mess."

Without giving his son-in-law time to protest, he touched rapidly but
vividly on the inutility and embarrassment of libel suits, and on the
devices whereby the legal means of vindication from such attacks may be
turned against those who have recourse to them; and Amherst listened
with a sickened sense of the incompatibility between abstract standards
of honour and their practical application.

"What should you do, then?" he murmured, as Mr. Langhope ended with his
light shrug and a "See Tredegar, if you don't believe me"--; and his
father-in-law replied with an evasive gesture: "Why, leave the
responsibility where it belongs!"

"Where it belongs?"

"To Fenton Carbury, of course. Luckily it's nobody's business but his,
and if he doesn't mind what is said about his wife I don't see how you
can take up the cudgels for her without casting another shade on her
somewhat chequered reputation."

Amherst stared. "His wife? What do I care what's said of her? I'm
thinking of mine!"

"Well, if Carbury has no objection to his wife's meeting Bowfort, I
don't see how you can object to her meeting him at your house. In such
matters, as you know, it has mercifully been decided that the husband's
attitude shall determine other people's; otherwise we should be deprived
of the legitimate pleasure of slandering our neighbours." Mr. Langhope
was always careful to temper his explanations with an "as you know": he
would have thought it ill-bred to omit this parenthesis in elucidating
the social code to his son-in-law.

"Then you mean that I can do nothing?" Amherst exclaimed.

Mr. Langhope smiled. "What applies to Carbury applies to you--by doing
nothing you establish the fact that there's nothing to do; just as you
create the difficulty by recognizing it." And he added, as Amherst sat
silent: "Take Bessy away, and they'll have to see each other elsewhere."

* * * * *

Amherst returned to Lynbrook with the echoes of this casuistry in his
brain. It seemed to him but a part of the ingenious system of evasion
whereby a society bent on the undisturbed pursuit of amusement had
contrived to protect itself from the intrusion of the disagreeable: a
policy summed up in Mr. Langhope's concluding advice that Amherst should
take his wife away. Yes--that was wealth's contemptuous answer to every
challenge of responsibility: duty, sorrow and disgrace were equally to
be evaded by a change of residence, and nothing in life need be faced
and fought out while one could pay for a passage to Europe!

In a calmer mood Amherst's sense of humour would have preserved him from
such a view of his father-in-law's advice; but just then it fell like a
spark on his smouldering prejudices. He was clear-sighted enough to
recognize the obstacles to legal retaliation; but this only made him the
more resolved to assert his will in his own house. He no longer paused
to consider the possible effect of such a course on his already strained
relations with his wife: the man's will rose in him and spoke.

The scene between Bessy and himself was short and sharp; and it ended in
a way that left him more than ever perplexed at the ways of her sex.
Impatient of preamble, he had opened the attack with his ultimatum: the
suspected couple were to be denied the house. Bessy flamed into
immediate defence of her friend; but to Amherst's surprise she no
longer sounded the note of her own rights. Husband and wife were
animated by emotions deeper-seated and more instinctive than had ever
before confronted them; yet while Amherst's resistance was gathering
strength from the conflict, Bessy unexpectedly collapsed in tears and
submission. She would do as he wished, of course--give up seeing
Blanche, dismiss Bowfort, wash her hands, in short, of the imprudent
pair--in such matters a woman needed a man's guidance, a wife must of
necessity see with her husband's eyes; and she looked up into his
through a mist of penitence and admiration....

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