The Fruit of the Tree: Chapter 22

Chapter 22

WHEN Amherst woke, the next morning, in the hotel to which he had gone
up from Lynbrook, he was oppressed by the sense that the hardest step he
had to take still lay before him. It had been almost easy to decide that
the moment of separation had come, for circumstances seemed to have
closed every other issue from his unhappy situation; but how tell his
wife of his decision? Amherst, to whom action was the first necessity of
being, became a weak procrastinator when he was confronted by the need
of writing instead of speaking.

To account for his abrupt departure from Lynbrook he had left word that
he was called to town on business; but, since he did not mean to return,
some farther explanation was now necessary, and he was paralyzed by the
difficulty of writing. He had already telegraphed to his friend that he
would be at the mills the next day; but the southern express did not
leave till the afternoon, and he still had several hours in which to
consider what he should say to his wife. To postpone the dreaded task,
he invented the pretext of some business to be despatched, and taking
the Subway to Wall Street consumed the morning in futile activities. But
since the renunciation of his work at Westmore he had no active concern
with the financial world, and by twelve o'clock he had exhausted his
imaginary affairs and was journeying up town again. He left the train at
Union Square, and walked along Fourth Avenue, now definitely resolved to
go back to the hotel and write his letter before lunching.

At Twenty-sixth Street he had struck into Madison Avenue, and was
striding onward with the fixed eye and aimless haste of the man who has
empty hours to fill, when a hansom drew up ahead of him and Justine
Brent sprang out. She was trimly dressed, as if for travel, with a small
bag in her hand; but at sight of him she paused with a cry of pleasure.

"Oh, Mr. Amherst, I'm so glad! I was afraid I might not see you for
goodbye."

"For goodbye?" Amherst paused, embarrassed. How had she guessed that he
did not mean to return to Lynbrook?

"You know," she reminded him, "I'm going to some friends near
Philadelphia for ten days"--and he remembered confusedly that a long
time ago--probably yesterday morning--he had heard her speak of her
projected visit.

"I had no idea," she continued, "that you were coming up to town
yesterday, or I should have tried to see you before you left. I wanted
to ask you to send me a line if Bessy needs me--I'll come back at once
if she does." Amherst continued to listen blankly, as if making a
painful effort to regain some consciousness of what was being said to
him, and she went on: "She seemed so nervous and poorly yesterday
evening that I was sorry I had decided to go----"

Her intent gaze reminded him that the emotions of the last twenty-four
hours must still be visible in his face; and the thought of what she
might detect helped to restore his self-possession. "You must not think
of giving up your visit," he began hurriedly--he had meant to add "on
account of Bessy," but he found himself unable to utter his wife's name.

Justine was still looking at him. "Oh, I'm sure everything will be all
right," she rejoined. "You go back this afternoon, I suppose? I've left
you a little note, with my address, and I want you to promise----"

She paused, for Amherst had made a motion as though to interrupt her.
The old confused sense that there must always be truth between them was
struggling in him with the strong restraints of habit and character; and
suddenly, before he was conscious of having decided to speak, he heard
himself say: "I ought to tell you that I am not going back."

"Not going back?" A flash of apprehension crossed Justine's face. "Not
till tomorrow, you mean?" she added, recovering herself.

Amherst hesitated, glancing vaguely up and down the street. At that
noonday hour it was nearly deserted, and Justine's driver dozed on his
perch above the hansom. They could speak almost as openly as if they had
been in one of the wood-paths at Lynbrook.

"Nor tomorrow," Amherst said in a low voice. There was another pause
before he added: "It may be some time before--" He broke off, and then
continued with an effort: "The fact is, I am thinking of going back to
my old work."

She caught him up with an exclamation of surprise and sympathy. "Your
old work? You mean at----"

She was checked by the quick contraction of pain in his face. "Not that!
I mean that I'm thinking of taking a new job--as manager of a Georgia
mill.... It's the only thing I know how to do, and I've got to do
something--" He forced a laugh. "The habit of work is incurable!"

Justine's face had grown as grave as his. She hesitated a moment,
looking down the street toward the angle of Madison Square, which was
visible from the corner where they stood.

"Will you walk back to the square with me? Then we can sit down a
moment."

She began to move as she spoke, and he walked beside her in silence till
they had gained the seat she pointed out. Her hansom trailed after them,
drawing up at the corner.

As Amherst sat down beside her, Justine turned to him with an air of
quiet resolution. "Mr. Amherst--will you let me ask you something? Is
this a sudden decision?"

"Yes. I decided yesterday."

"And Bessy----?"

His glance dropped for the first time, but Justine pressed her point.
"Bessy approves?"

"She--she will, I think--when she knows----"

"When she knows?" Her emotion sprang into her face. "When she knows?
Then she does not--yet?"

"No. The offer came suddenly. I must go at once."

"Without seeing her?" She cut him short with a quick commanding gesture.
"Mr. Amherst, you can't do this--you won't do it! You will not go away
without seeing Bessy!" she said.

Her eyes sought his and drew them upward, constraining them to meet the
full beam of her rebuking gaze.

"I must do what seems best under the circumstances," he answered
hesitatingly. "She will hear from me, of course; I shall write
today--and later----"

"Not later! _Now_--you will go back now to Lynbrook! Such things can't
be told in writing--if they must be said at all, they must be spoken.
Don't tell me that I don't understand--or that I'm meddling in what
doesn't concern me. I don't care a fig for that! I've always meddled in
what didn't concern me--I always shall, I suppose, till I die! And I
understand enough to know that Bessy is very unhappy--and that you're
the wiser and stronger of the two. I know what it's been to you to give
up your work--to feel yourself useless," she interrupted herself, with
softening eyes, "and I know how you've tried...I've watched you...but
Bessy has tried too; and even if you've both failed--if you've come to
the end of your resources--it's for you to face the fact, and help her
face it--not to run away from it like this!"

Amherst sat silent under the assault of her eloquence. He was conscious
of no instinctive resentment, no sense that she was, as she confessed,
meddling in matters which did not concern her. His ebbing spirit was
revived by the shock of an ardour like his own. She had not shrunk from
calling him a coward--and it did him good to hear her call him so! Her
words put life back into its true perspective, restored their meaning to
obsolete terms: to truth and manliness and courage. He had lived so long
among equivocations that he had forgotten how to look a fact in the
face; but here was a woman who judged life by his own standards--and by
those standards she had found him wanting!

Still, he could not forget the last bitter hours, or change his opinion
as to the futility of attempting to remain at Lynbrook. He felt as
strongly as ever the need of moral and mental liberation--the right to
begin life again on his own terms. But Justine Brent had made him see
that his first step toward self-assertion had been the inconsistent one
of trying to evade its results.

"You are right--I will go back," he said.

She thanked him with her eyes, as she had thanked him on the terrace at
Lynbrook, on the autumn evening which had witnessed their first broken
exchange of confidences; and he was struck once more with the change
that feeling produced in her. Emotions flashed across her face like the
sweep of sun-rent clouds over a quiet landscape, bringing out the gleam
of hidden waters, the fervour of smouldering colours, all the subtle
delicacies of modelling that are lost under the light of an open sky.
And it was extraordinary how she could infuse into a principle the
warmth and colour of a passion! If conduct, to most people, seemed a
cold matter of social prudence or inherited habit, to her it was always
the newly-discovered question of her own relation to life--as most women
see the great issues only through their own wants and prejudices, so she
seemed always to see her personal desires in the light of the larger
claims.

"But I don't think," Amherst went on, "that anything can be said to
convince me that I ought to alter my decision. These months of idleness
have shown me that I'm one of the members of society who are a danger to
the community if their noses are not kept to the grindstone----"

Justine lowered her eyes musingly, and he saw she was undergoing the
reaction of constraint which always followed on her bursts of
unpremeditated frankness.

"That is not for me to judge," she answered after a moment. "But if you
decide to go away for a time--surely it ought to be in such a way that
your going does not seem to cast any reflection on Bessy, or subject her
to any unkind criticism."

Amherst, reddening slightly, glanced at her in surprise. "I don't think
you need fear that--I shall be the only one criticized," he said drily.

"Are you sure--if you take such a position as you spoke of? So few
people understand the love of hard work for its own sake. They will say
that your quarrel with your wife has driven you to support yourself--and
that will be cruel to Bessy."

Amherst shrugged his shoulders. "They'll be more likely to say I tried
to play the gentleman and failed, and wasn't happy till I got back to my
own place in life--which is true enough," he added with a touch of
irony.

"They may say that too; but they will make Bessy suffer first--and it
will be your fault if she is humiliated in that way. If you decide to
take up your factory work for a time, can't you do so without--without
accepting a salary? Oh, you see I stick at nothing," she broke in upon
herself with a laugh, "and Bessy has said things which make me see that
she would suffer horribly if--if you put such a slight on her." He
remained silent, and she went on urgently: "From Bessy's standpoint it
would mean a decisive break--the repudiating of your whole past. And it
is a question on which you can afford to be generous, because I know...I
think...it's less important in your eyes than hers...."

Amherst glanced at her quickly. "That particular form of indebtedness,
you mean?"

She smiled. "The easiest to cancel, and therefore the least galling;
isn't that the way you regard it?"

"I used to--yes; but--" He was about to add: "No one at Lynbrook does,"
but the flash of intelligence in her eyes restrained him, while at the
same time it seemed to answer: "There's my point! To see their
limitation is to allow for it, since every enlightenment brings a
corresponding obligation."

She made no attempt to put into words the argument her look conveyed,
but rose from her seat with a rapid glance at her watch.

"And now I must go, or I shall miss my train." She held out her hand,
and as Amherst's met it, he said in a low tone, as if in reply to her
unspoken appeal: "I shall remember all you have said."

* * * * *

It was a new experience for Amherst to be acting under the pressure of
another will; but during his return journey to Lynbrook that afternoon
it was pure relief to surrender himself to this pressure, and the
surrender brought not a sense of weakness but of recovered energy. It
was not in his nature to analyze his motives, or spend his strength in
weighing closely balanced alternatives of conduct; and though, during
the last purposeless months, he had grown to brood over every spring of
action in himself and others, this tendency disappeared at once in
contact with the deed to be done. It was as though a tributary stream,
gathering its crystal speed among the hills, had been suddenly poured
into the stagnant waters of his will; and he saw now how thick and
turbid those waters had become--how full of the slime-bred life that
chokes the springs of courage.

His whole desire now was to be generous to his wife: to bear the full
brunt of whatever pain their parting brought. Justine had said that
Bessy seemed nervous and unhappy: it was clear, therefore, that she also
had suffered from the wounds they had dealt each other, though she kept
her unmoved front to the last. Poor child! Perhaps that insensible
exterior was the only way she knew of expressing courage! It seemed to
Amherst that all means of manifesting the finer impulses must slowly
wither in the Lynbrook air. As he approached his destination, his
thoughts of her were all pitiful: nothing remained of the personal
resentment which had debased their parting. He had telephoned from town
to announce the hour of his return, and when he emerged from the station
he half-expected to find her seated in the brougham whose lamps
signalled him through the early dusk. It would be like her to undergo
such a reaction of feeling, and to express it, not in words, but by
taking up their relation as if there had been no break in it. He had
once condemned this facility of renewal as a sign of lightness, a
result of that continual evasion of serious issues which made the life
of Bessy's world a thin crust of custom above a void of thought. But he
now saw that, if she was the product of her environment, that
constituted but another claim on his charity, and made the more precious
any impulses of natural feeling that had survived the unifying pressure
of her life. As he approached the brougham, he murmured mentally: "What
if I were to try once more?"

Bessy had not come to meet him; but he said to himself that he should
find her alone at the house, and that he would make his confession at
once. As the carriage passed between the lights on the tall stone
gate-posts, and rolled through the bare shrubberies of the avenue, he
felt a momentary tightening of the heart--a sense of stepping back into
the trap from which he had just wrenched himself free--a premonition of
the way in which the smooth systematized routine of his wife's existence
might draw him back into its revolutions as he had once seen a careless
factory hand seized and dragged into a flying belt....

But it was only for a moment; then his thoughts reverted to Bessy. It
was she who was to be considered--this time he must be strong enough for
both.

The butler met him on the threshold, flanked by the usual array of
footmen; and as he saw his portmanteau ceremoniously passed from hand
to hand, Amherst once more felt the steel of the springe on his neck.

"Is Mrs. Amherst in the drawing-room, Knowles?" he asked.

"No, sir," said Knowles, who had too high a sense of fitness to
volunteer any information beyond the immediate fact required of him.

"She has gone up to her sitting-room, then?" Amherst continued, turning
toward the broad sweep of the stairway.

"No, sir," said the butler slowly; "Mrs. Amherst has gone away."

"Gone away?" Amherst stopped short, staring blankly at the man's smooth
official mask.

"This afternoon, sir; to Mapleside."

"To Mapleside?"

"Yes, sir, by motor--to stay with Mrs. Carbury."

There was a moment's silence. It had all happened so quickly that
Amherst, with the dual vision which comes at such moments, noticed that
the third footman--or was it the fourth?--was just passing his
portmanteau on to a shirt-sleeved arm behind the door which led to the
servant's wing....

He roused himself to look at the tall clock. It was just six. He had
telephoned from town at two.

"At what time did Mrs. Amherst leave?"

The butler meditated. "Sharp at four, sir. The maid took the three-forty
with the luggage."

With the luggage! So it was not a mere one-night visit. The blood rose
slowly to Amherst's face. The footmen had disappeared, but presently the
door at the back of the hall reopened, and one of them came out,
carrying an elaborately-appointed tea-tray toward the smoking-room. The
routine of the house was going on as if nothing had happened.... The
butler looked at Amherst with respectful--too respectful--interrogation,
and he was suddenly conscious that he was standing motionless in the
middle of the hall, with one last intolerable question on his lips.

Well--it had to be spoken! "Did Mrs. Amherst receive my telephone
message?"

"Yes, sir. I gave it to her myself."

It occurred confusedly to Amherst that a well-bred man--as Lynbrook
understood the phrase--would, at this point, have made some tardy feint
of being in his wife's confidence, of having, on second thoughts, no
reason to be surprised at her departure. It was humiliating, he
supposed, to be thus laying bare his discomfiture to his dependents--he
could see that even Knowles was affected by the manifest impropriety of
the situation--but no pretext presented itself to his mind, and after
another interval of silence he turned slowly toward the door of the
smoking-room.

"My letters are here, I suppose?" he paused on the threshold to enquire;
and on the butler's answering in the affirmative, he said to himself,
with a last effort to suspend his judgment: "She has left a line--there
will be some explanation----"

But there was nothing--neither word nor message; nothing but the
reverberating retort of her departure in the face of his return--her
flight to Blanche Carbury as the final answer to his final appeal.

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