The Fruit of the Tree: Chapter 24

Chapter 24

JUSTINE was pacing the long library at Lynbrook, between the caged sets
of standard authors.

She felt as much caged as they: as much a part of a conventional
stage-setting totally unrelated to the action going on before it. Two
weeks had passed since her return from Philadelphia; and during that
time she had learned that her usefulness at Lynbrook was over. Though
not unwelcome, she might almost call herself unwanted; life swept by,
leaving her tethered to the stake of inaction; a bitter lot for one who
chose to measure existence by deeds instead of days. She had found Bessy
ostensibly busy with a succession of guests; no one in the house needed
her but Cicely, and even Cicely, at times, was caught up into the whirl
of her mother's life, swept off on sleighing parties and motor-trips, or
carried to town for a dancing-class or an opera matin�e.

Mrs. Fenton Carbury was not among the visitors who left Lynbrook on the
Monday after Justine's return.

Mr. Carbury, with the other bread-winners of the party, had hastened
back to his treadmill in Wall Street after a Sunday spent in silently
studying the files of the Financial Record; but his wife stayed on,
somewhat aggressively in possession, criticizing and rearranging the
furniture, ringing for the servants, making sudden demands on the
stable, telegraphing, telephoning, ordering fires lighted or windows
opened, and leaving everywhere in her wake a trail of cigarette ashes
and cocktail glasses.

Ned Bowfort had not been included in the house-party; but on the day of
its dispersal he rode over unannounced for luncheon, put up his horse in
the stable, threaded his way familiarly among the dozing dogs in the
hall, greeted Mrs. Ansell and Justine with just the right shade of quiet
deference, produced from his pocket a new puzzle-game for Cicely, and
sat down beside her mother with the quiet urbanity of the family friend
who knows his privileges but is too discreet to abuse them.

After that he came every day, sometimes riding home late to the Hunt
Club, sometimes accompanying Bessy and Mrs. Carbury to town for dinner
and the theatre; but always with his deprecating air of having dropped
in by accident, and modestly hoping that his intrusion was not
unwelcome.

The following Sunday brought another influx of visitors, and Bessy
seemed to fling herself with renewed enthusiasm into the cares of
hospitality. She had avoided Justine since their midnight talk,
contriving to see her in Cicely's presence, or pleading haste when they
found themselves alone. The winter was unusually open, and she spent
long hours in the saddle when her time was not taken up with her
visitors. For a while she took Cicely on her daily rides; but she soon
wearied of adapting her hunter's stride to the pace of the little girl's
pony, and Cicely was once more given over to the coachman's care.

Then came snow and a long frost, and Bessy grew restless at her
imprisonment, and grumbled that there was no way of keeping well in a
winter climate which made regular exercise impossible.

"Why not build a squash-court?" Blanche Carbury proposed; and the two
fell instantly to making plans under the guidance of Ned Bowfort and
Westy Gaines. As the scheme developed, various advisers suggested that
it was a pity not to add a bowling-alley, a swimming-tank and a
gymnasium; a fashionable architect was summoned from town, measurements
were taken, sites discussed, sketches compared, and engineers consulted
as to the cost of artesian wells and the best system for heating the
tank.

Bessy seemed filled with a feverish desire to carry out the plan as
quickly as possible, and on as large a scale as even the architect's
invention soared to; but it was finally decided that, before signing the
contracts, she should run over to New Jersey to see a building of the
same kind on which a sporting friend of Mrs. Carbury's had recently
lavished a fortune.

It was on this errand that the two ladies, in company with Westy Gaines
and Bowfort, had departed on the day which found Justine restlessly
measuring the length of the library. She and Mrs. Ansell had the house
to themselves; and it was hardly a surprise to her when, in the course
of the afternoon, Mrs. Ansell, after a discreet pause on the threshold,
advanced toward her down the long room.

Since the night of her return Justine had felt sure that Mrs. Ansell
would speak; but the elder lady was given to hawk-like circlings about
her subject, to hanging over it and contemplating it before her wings
dropped for the descent.

Now, however, it was plain that she had resolved to strike; and Justine
had a sense of relief at the thought. She had been too long isolated in
her anxiety, her powerlessness to help; and she had a vague hope that
Mrs. Ansell's worldly wisdom might accomplish what her inexperience had
failed to achieve.

"Shall we sit by the fire? I am glad to find you alone," Mrs. Ansell
began, with the pleasant abruptness that was one of the subtlest
instruments of her indirection; and as Justine acquiesced, she added,
yielding her slight lines to the luxurious depths of an arm-chair: "I
have been rather suddenly asked by an invalid cousin to go to Europe
with her next week, and I can't go contentedly without being at peace
about our friends."

She paused, but Justine made no answer. In spite of her growing sympathy
for Mrs. Ansell she could not overcome an inherent distrust, not of her
methods, but of her ultimate object. What, for instance, was her
conception of being at peace about the Amhersts? Justine's own
conviction was that, as far as their final welfare was concerned, any
terms were better between them than the external harmony which had
prevailed during Amherst's stay at Lynbrook.

The subtle emanation of her distrust may have been felt by Mrs. Ansell;
for the latter presently continued, with a certain nobleness: "I am the
more concerned because I believe I must hold myself, in a small degree,
responsible for Bessy's marriage--" and, as Justine looked at her in
surprise, she added: "I thought she could never be happy unless her
affections were satisfied--and even now I believe so."

"I believe so too," Justine said, surprised into assent by the
simplicity of Mrs. Ansell's declaration.

"Well, then--since we are agreed in our diagnosis," the older woman went
on, smiling, "what remedy do you suggest? Or rather, how can we
administer it?"

"What remedy?" Justine hesitated.

"Oh, I believe we are agreed on that too. Mr. Amherst must be brought
back--but how to bring him?" She paused, and then added, with a singular
effect of appealing frankness: "I ask you, because I believe you to be
the only one of Bessy's friends who is in the least in her husband's
confidence."

Justine's embarrassment increased. Would it not be disloyal both to
Bessy and Amherst to acknowledge to a third person a fact of which Bessy
herself was unaware? Yet to betray embarrassment under Mrs. Ansell's
eyes was to risk giving it a dangerous significance.

"Bessy has spoken to me once or twice--but I know very little of Mr.
Amherst's point of view; except," Justine added, after another moment's
weighing of alternatives, "that I believe he suffers most from being cut
off from his work at Westmore."

"Yes--so I think; but that is a difficulty that time and expediency must
adjust. All _we_ can do--their friends, I mean--is to get them together
again before the breach is too wide."

Justine pondered. She was perhaps more ignorant of the situation than
Mrs. Ansell imagined, for since her talk with Bessy the latter had not
again alluded to Amherst's absence, and Justine could merely conjecture
that he had carried out his plan of taking the management of the mill he
had spoken of. What she most wished to know was whether he had listened
to her entreaty, and taken the position temporarily, without binding
himself by the acceptance of a salary; or whether, wounded by the
outrage of Bessy's flight, he had freed himself from financial
dependence by engaging himself definitely as manager.

"I really know very little of the present situation," Justine said,
looking at Mrs. Ansell. "Bessy merely told me that Mr. Amherst had taken
up his old work in a cotton mill in the south."

As her eyes met Mrs. Ansell's it flashed across her that the latter did
not believe what she said, and the perception made her instantly shrink
back into herself. But there was nothing in Mrs. Ansell's tone to
confirm the doubt which her look betrayed.

"Ah--I hoped you knew more," she said simply; "for, like you, I have
only heard from Bessy that her husband went away suddenly to help a
friend who is reorganizing some mills in Georgia. Of course, under the
circumstances, such a temporary break is natural enough--perhaps
inevitable--only he must not stay away too long."

Justine was silent. Mrs. Ansell's momentary self-betrayal had checked
all farther possibility of frank communion, and the discerning lady had
seen her error too late to remedy it.

But her hearer's heart gave a leap of joy. It was clear from what Mrs.
Ansell said that Amherst had not bound himself definitely, since he
would not have done so without informing his wife. And with a secret
thrill of happiness Justine recalled his last word to her: "I will
remember all you have said."

He had kept that word and acted on it; in spite of Bessy's last assault
on his pride he had borne with her, and deferred the day of final
rupture; and the sense that she had had a part in his decision filled
Justine with a glow of hope. The consciousness of Mrs. Ansell's
suspicions faded to insignificance--Mrs. Ansell and her kind might think
what they chose, since all that mattered now was that she herself
should act bravely and circumspectly in her last attempt to save her
friends.

"I am not sure," Mrs. Ansell continued, gently scrutinizing her
companion, "that I think it unwise of him to have gone; but if he stays
too long Bessy may listen to bad advice--advice disastrous to her
happiness." She paused, and turned her eyes meditatively toward the
fire. "As far as I know," she said, with the same air of serious
candour, "you are the only person who can tell him this."

"I?" exclaimed Justine, with a leap of colour to her pale cheeks.

Mrs. Ansell's eyes continued to avoid her. "My dear Miss Brent, Bessy
has told me something of the wise counsels you have given her. Mr.
Amherst is also your friend. As I said just now, you are the only person
who might act as a link between them--surely you will not renounce the
r�le."

Justine controlled herself. "My only r�le, as you call it, has been to
urge Bessy to--to try to allow for her husband's views----"

"And have you not given the same advice to Mr. Amherst?"

The eyes of the two women met. "Yes," said Justine, after a moment.

"Then why refuse your help now? The moment is crucial."

Justine's thoughts had flown beyond the stage of resenting Mrs. Ansell's
gentle pertinacity. All her faculties were absorbed in the question as
to how she could most effectually use whatever influence she possessed.

"I put it to you as one old friend to another--will you write to Mr.
Amherst to come back?" Mrs. Ansell urged her.

Justine was past considering even the strangeness of this request, and
its oblique reflection on the kind of power ascribed to her. Through the
confused beatings of her heart she merely struggled for a clearer sense
of guidance.

"No," she said slowly. "I cannot."

"You cannot? With a friend's happiness in extremity?" Mrs. Ansell paused
a moment before she added. "Unless you believe that Bessy would be
happier divorced?"

"Divorced--? Oh, no," Justine shuddered.

"That is what it will come to."

"No, no! In time----"

"Time is what I am most afraid of, when Blanche Carbury disposes of it."

Justine breathed a deep sigh.

"You'll write?" Mrs. Ansell murmured, laying a soft touch on her hand.

"I have not the influence you think----"

"Can you do any harm by trying?"

"I might--" Justine faltered, losing her exact sense of the words she
used.

"Ah," the other flashed back, "then you _have_ influence! Why will you
not use it?"

Justine waited a moment; then her resolve gathered itself into words.
"If I have any influence, I am not sure it would be well to use it as
you suggest."

"Not to urge Mr. Amherst's return?"

"No--not now."

She caught the same veiled gleam of incredulity under Mrs. Ansell's
lids--caught and disregarded it.

"It must be now or never," Mrs. Ansell insisted.

"I can't think so," Justine held out.

"Nevertheless--will you try?"

"No--no! It might be fatal."

"To whom?"

"To both." She considered. "If he came back now I know he would not
stay."

Mrs. Ansell was upon her abruptly. "You _know_? Then you speak with
authority?"

"No--what authority? I speak as I feel," Justine faltered.

The older woman drew herself to her feet. "Ah--then you shoulder a great
responsibility!" She moved nearer to Justine, and once more laid a
fugitive touch upon her. "You won't write to him?"

"No--no," the girl flung back; and the voices of the returning party in
the hall made Mrs. Ansell, with an almost imperceptible gesture of
warning, turn musingly away toward the fire.

* * * * *

Bessy came back brimming with the wonders she had seen. A glazed
"sun-room," mosaic pavements, a marble fountain to feed the marble
tank--and outside a water-garden, descending in successive terraces, to
take up and utilize--one could see how practically!--the overflow from
the tank. If one did the thing at all, why not do it decently? She had
given up her new motor, had let her town house, had pinched and stinted
herself in a hundred ways--if ever woman was entitled to a little
compensating pleasure, surely she was that woman!

The days were crowded with consultations. Architect, contractors,
engineers, a landscape gardener, and a dozen minor craftsmen, came and
went, unrolled plans, moistened pencils, sketched, figured, argued,
persuaded, and filled Bessy with the dread of appearing, under Blanche
Carbury's eyes, subject to any restraining influences of economy. What!
She was a young woman, with an independent fortune, and she was always
wavering, considering, secretly referring back to the mute criticism of
an invisible judge--of the husband who had been first to shake himself
free of any mutual subjection? The accomplished Blanche did not have to
say this--she conveyed it by the raising of painted brows, by a smile of
mocking interrogation, a judiciously placed silence or a resigned glance
at the architect. So the estimates poured in, were studied,
resisted--then yielded to and signed; then the hour of advance payments
struck, and an imperious appeal was despatched to Mr. Tredegar, to whom
the management of Bessy's affairs had been transferred.

Mr. Tredegar, to his client's surprise, answered the appeal in person.
He had not been lately to Lynbrook, dreading the cold and damp of the
country in winter; and his sudden arrival had therefore an ominous
significance.

He came for an evening in mid-week, when even Blanche Carbury was
absent, and Bessy and Justine had the house to themselves. Mrs. Ansell
had sailed the week before with her invalid cousin. No farther words had
passed between herself and Justine--but the latter was conscious that
their talk had increased instead of lessened the distance between them.
Justine herself meant to leave soon. Her hope of regaining Bessy's
confidence had been deceived, and seeing herself definitely superseded,
she chafed anew at her purposeless inactivity. She had already written
to one or two doctors in New York, and to the matron of Saint
Elizabeth's. She had made herself a name in surgical cases, and it could
not be long before a summons came....

Meanwhile Mr. Tredegar arrived, and the three dined together, the two
women bending meekly to his discourse, which was never more oracular and
authoritative than when delivered to the gentler sex alone. Amherst's
absence, in particular, seemed to loose the thin current of Mr.
Tredegar's eloquence. He was never quite at ease in the presence of an
independent mind, and Justine often reflected that, even had the two men
known nothing of each other's views, there would have been between them
an instinctive and irreducible hostility--they would have disliked each
other if they had merely jostled elbows in the street.

Yet even freed from Amherst's presence Mr. Tredegar showed a darkling
brow, and as Justine slipped away after dinner she felt that she left
Bessy to something more serious than the usual business conference.

How serious, she was to learn that very night, when, in the small hours,
her friend burst in on her tearfully. Bessy was ruined--ruined--that was
what Mr. Tredegar had come to tell her! She might have known he would
not have travelled to Lynbrook for a trifle.... She had expected to find
herself cramped, restricted--to be warned that she must "manage,"
hateful word!... But this! This was incredible! Unendurable! There was
no money to build the gymnasium--none at all! And all because it had
been swallowed up at Westmore--because the ridiculous changes there,
the changes that nobody wanted, nobody approved of--that Truscomb and
all the other experts had opposed and derided from the first--these
changes, even modified and arrested, had already involved so much of her
income, that it might be years--yes, he said _years_!--before she would
feel herself free again--free of her own fortune, of Cicely's
fortune...of the money poor Dick Westmore had meant his wife and child
to enjoy!

Justine listened anxiously to this confused outpouring of resentments.
Bessy's born incapacity for figures made it indeed possible that the
facts came on her as a surprise--that she had quite forgotten the
temporary reduction of her income, and had begun to imagine that what
she had saved in one direction was hers to spend in another. All this
was conceivable. But why had Mr. Tredegar drawn so dark a picture of the
future? Or was it only that, thwarted of her immediate desire, Bessy's
disappointment blackened the farthest verge of her horizon? Justine,
though aware of her friend's lack of perspective, suspected that a
conniving hand had helped to throw the prospect out of drawing....

Could it be possible, then, that Mr. Tredegar was among those who
desired a divorce? That the influences at which Mrs. Ansell had hinted
proceeded not only from Blanche Carbury and her group? Helpless amid
this rush of forebodings, Justine could do no more than soothe and
restrain--to reason would have been idle. She had never till now
realized how completely she had lost ground with Bessy.

"The humiliation--before my friends! Oh, I was warned...my father, every
one...for Cicely's sake I was warned...but I wouldn't listen--and _now_!
From the first it was all he cared for--in Europe, even, he was always
dragging me to factories. _Me?_--I was only the owner of Westmore! He
wanted power--power, that's all--when he lost it he left me...oh, I'm
glad now my baby is dead! Glad there's nothing between us--nothing,
nothing in the world to tie us together any longer!"

The disproportion between this violent grief and its trivial cause would
have struck Justine as simply grotesque, had she not understood that the
incident of the gymnasium, which followed with cumulative pressure on a
series of similar episodes, seemed to Bessy like the reaching out of a
retaliatory hand--a mocking reminder that she was still imprisoned in
the consequences of her unhappy marriage.

Such folly seemed past weeping for--it froze Justine's compassion into
disdain, till she remembered that the sources of our sorrow are
sometimes nobler than their means of expression, and that a baffled
unappeased love was perhaps the real cause of Bessy's anger against her
husband.

At any rate, the moment was a critical one, and Justine remembered with
a pang that Mrs. Ansell had foreseen such a contingency, and implored
her to take measures against it. She had refused, from a sincere dread
of precipitating a definite estrangement--but had she been right in
judging the situation so logically? With a creature of Bessy's emotional
uncertainties the result of contending influences was really
incalculable--it might still be that, at this juncture, Amherst's return
would bring about a reaction of better feelings....

Justine sat and mused on these things after leaving her friend exhausted
upon a tearful pillow. She felt that she had perhaps taken too large a
survey of the situation--that the question whether there could ever be
happiness between this tormented pair was not one to concern those who
struggled for their welfare. Most marriages are a patch-work of jarring
tastes and ill-assorted ambitions--if here and there, for a moment, two
colours blend, two textures are the same, so much the better for the
pattern! Justine, certainly, could foresee in reunion no positive
happiness for either of her friends; but she saw positive disaster for
Bessy in separation from her husband....

Suddenly she rose from her chair by the falling fire, and crossed over
to the writing-table. She would write to Amherst herself--she would tell
him to come. The decision once reached, hope flowed back to her
heart--the joy of action so often deceived her into immediate faith in
its results!

"Dear Mr. Amherst," she wrote, "the last time I saw you, you told me you
would remember what I said. I ask you to do so now--to remember that I
urged you not to be away too long. I believe you ought to come back now,
though I know Bessy will not ask you to. I am writing without her
knowledge, but with the conviction that she needs you, though perhaps
without knowing it herself...."

She paused, and laid down her pen. Why did it make her so happy to write
to him? Was it merely the sense of recovered helpfulness, or something
warmer, more personal, that made it a joy to trace his name, and to
remind him of their last intimate exchange of words? Well--perhaps it
was that too. There were moments when she was so mortally lonely that
any sympathetic contact with another life sent a glow into her
veins--that she was thankful to warm herself at any fire.

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