The Fruit of the Tree: Chapter 38

Chapter 38

AT half-past six that afternoon, just as Amherst, on his return from the
mills, put the key into his door at Hanaford, Mrs. Ansell, in New York,
was being shown into Mr. Langhope's library.

As she entered, her friend rose from his chair by the fire, and turned
on her a face so disordered by emotion that she stopped short with an
exclamation of alarm.

"Henry--what has happened? Why did you send for me?"

"Because I couldn't go to you. I couldn't trust myself in the
streets--in the light of day."

"But why? What is it?--Not Cicely----?"

He struck both hands upward with a comprehensive gesture.
"Cicely--everyone--the whole world!" His clenched fist came down on the
table against which he was leaning. "Maria, my girl might have been
saved!"

Mrs. Ansell looked at him with growing perturbation. "Saved--Bessy's
life? But how? By whom?"

"She might have been allowed to live, I mean--to recover. She was
killed, Maria; that woman killed her!"

Mrs. Ansell, with another cry of bewilderment, let herself drop
helplessly into the nearest chair. "In heaven's name, Henry--what
woman?"

He seated himself opposite to her, clutching at his stick, and leaning
his weight heavily on it--a white dishevelled old man. "I wonder why you
ask--just to spare me?"

Their eyes met in a piercing exchange of question and answer, and Mrs.
Ansell tried to bring out reasonably: "I ask in order to understand what
you are saying."

"Well, then, if you insist on keeping up appearances--my daughter-in-law
killed my daughter. There you have it." He laughed silently, with a tear
on his reddened eye-lids.

Mrs. Ansell groaned. "Henry, you are raving--I understand less and
less."

"I don't see how I can speak more plainly. She told me so herself, in
this room, not an hour ago."

"She told you? Who told you?"

"John Amherst's wife. Told me she'd killed my child. It's as easy as
breathing--if you know how to use a morphia-needle."

Light seemed at last to break on his hearer. "Oh, my poor Henry--you
mean--she gave too much? There was some dreadful accident?"

"There was no accident. She killed my child--killed her deliberately.
Don't look at me as if I were a madman. She sat in that chair you're in
when she told me."

"Justine? Has she been here today?" Mrs. Ansell paused in a painful
effort to readjust her thoughts. "But _why_ did she tell you?"

"That's simple enough. To prevent Wyant's doing it."

"Oh----" broke from his hearer, in a long sigh of fear and intelligence.
Mr. Langhope looked at her with a smile of miserable exultation.

"You knew--you suspected all along?--But now you must speak out!" he
exclaimed with a sudden note of command.

She sat motionless, as if trying to collect herself. "I know nothing--I
only meant--why was this never known before?"

He was upon her at once. "You think--because they understood each other?
And now there's been a break between them? He wanted too big a share of
the spoils? Oh, it's all so abysmally vile!"

He covered his face with a shaking hand, and Mrs. Ansell remained
silent, plunged in a speechless misery of conjecture. At length she
regained some measure of her habitual composure, and leaning forward,
with her eyes on his face, said in a quiet tone: "If I am to help you,
you must try to tell me just what has happened."

He made an impatient gesture. "Haven't I told you? She found that her
accomplice meant to speak, and rushed to town to forestall him."

Mrs. Ansell reflected. "But why--with his place at Saint Christopher's
secured--did Dr. Wyant choose this time to threaten her--if, as you
imagine, he's an accomplice?"

"Because he's a drug-taker, and she didn't wish him to have the place."

"She didn't wish it? But that does not look as if she were afraid. She
had only to hold her tongue!"

Mr. Langhope laughed sardonically. "It's not quite so simple. Amherst
was coming to town to tell me."

"Ah--_he_ knows?"

"Yes--and she preferred that I should have her version first."

"And what is her version?"

The furrows of misery deepened in Mr. Langhope's face. "Maria--don't ask
too much of me! I can't go over it again. She says she wanted to spare
my child--she says the doctors were keeping her alive, torturing her
uselessly, as a...a sort of scientific experiment.... She forced on me
the hideous details...."

Mrs. Ansell waited a moment.

"Well! May it not be true?"

"Wyant's version is different. _He_ says Bessy would have recovered--he
says Garford thought so too."

"And what does she answer? She denies it?"

"No. She admits that Garford was in doubt. But she says the chance was
too remote--the pain too bad...that's her cue, naturally!"

Mrs. Ansell, leaning back in her chair, with hands meditatively
stretched along its arms, gave herself up to silent consideration of the
fragmentary statements cast before her. The long habit of ministering to
her friends in moments of perplexity and distress had given her an
almost judicial keenness in disentangling and coordinating facts
incoherently presented, and in seizing on the thread of motive that
connected them; but she had never before been confronted with a
situation so poignant in itself, and bearing so intimately on her
personal feelings; and she needed time to free her thoughts from the
impending rush of emotion.

At last she raised her head and said: "Why did Mr. Amherst let her come
to you, instead of coming himself?"

"He knows nothing of her being here. She persuaded him to wait a day,
and as soon as he had gone to the mills this morning she took the first
train to town."

"Ah----" Mrs. Ansell murmured thoughtfully; and Mr. Langhope rejoined,
with a conclusive gesture: "Do you want more proofs of panic-stricken
guilt?"

"Oh, guilt--" His friend revolved her large soft muff about a drooping
hand. "There's so much still to understand."

"Your mind does not, as a rule, work so slowly!" he said with some
asperity; but she paid no heed to his tone.

"Amherst, for instance--how long has he known of this?" she continued.

"A week or two only--she made that clear."

"And what is his attitude?"

"Ah--that, I conjecture, is just what she means to keep us from
knowing!"

"You mean she's afraid----?"

Mr. Langhope gathered his haggard brows in a frown. "She's afraid, of
course--mortally--I never saw a woman more afraid. I only wonder she had
the courage to face me."

"Ah--that's it! Why _did_ she face you? To extenuate her act--to give
you her version, because she feared his might be worse? Do you gather
that that was her motive?"

It was Mr. Langhope's turn to hesitate. He furrowed the thick Turkey rug
with the point of his ebony stick, pausing once or twice to revolve it
gimlet-like in a gap of the pile.

"Not her avowed motive, naturally."

"Well--at least, then, let me have that."

"Her avowed motive? Oh, she'd prepared one, of course--trust her to
have a dozen ready! The one she produced was--simply the desire to
protect her husband."

"Her husband? Does _he_ too need protection?"

"My God, if he takes her side----! At any rate, her fear seemed to be
that what she had done might ruin him; might cause him to feel--as well
he may!--that the mere fact of being her husband makes his situation as
Cicely's step-father, as my son-in-law, intolerable. And she came to
clear him, as it were--to find out, in short, on what terms I should be
willing to continue my present relations with him as though this hideous
thing had not been known to me."

Mrs. Ansell raised her head quickly. "Well--and what were your terms?"

He hesitated. "She spared me the pain of proposing any--I had only to
accept hers."

"Hers?"

"That she should disappear altogether from my sight--and from the
child's, naturally. Good heaven, I should like to include Amherst in
that! But I'm tied hand and foot, as you see, by Cicely's interests; and
I'm bound to say she exonerated him completely--completely!"

Mrs. Ansell was again silent, but a swift flight of thoughts traversed
her drooping face. "But if you are to remain on the old terms with her
husband, how is she to disappear out of your life without also
disappearing out of his?"

Mr. Langhope gave a slight laugh. "I leave her to work out that
problem."

"And you think Amherst will consent to such conditions?"

"He's not to know of them."

The unexpectedness of the reply reduced Mrs. Ansell to a sound of
inarticulate interrogation; and Mr. Langhope continued: "Not at first,
that is. She had thought it all out--foreseen everything; and she wrung
from me--I don't yet know how!--a promise that when I saw him I would
make it appear that I cleared him completely, not only of any possible
complicity, or whatever you choose to call it, but of any sort of
connection with the matter in my thoughts of him. I am, in short, to let
him feel that he and I are to continue on the old footing--and I agreed,
on the condition of her effacing herself somehow--of course on some
other pretext."

"Some other pretext? But what conceivable pretext? My poor friend, he
adores her!"

Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. "We haven't seen him since
this became known to him. _She_ has; and she let slip that he was
horror-struck."

Mrs. Ansell looked up with a quick exclamation. "Let slip? Isn't it
much more likely that she forced it on you--emphasized it to the last
limit of credulity?" She sank her hands to the arms of the chair, and
exclaimed, looking him straight in the eyes: "You say she was
frightened? It strikes me she was dauntless!"

Mr. Langhope stared a moment; then he said, with an ironic shrug: "No
doubt, then, she counted on its striking me too."

Mrs. Ansell breathed a shuddering sigh. "Oh, I understand your feeling
as you do--I'm deep in the horror of it myself. But I can't help seeing
that this woman might have saved herself--and that she's chosen to save
her husband instead. What I don't see, from what I know of him," she
musingly proceeded, "is how, on any imaginable pretext, she will induce
him to accept the sacrifice."

Mr. Langhope made a resentful movement. "If that's the only point your
mind dwells on----!"

Mrs. Ansell looked up. "It doesn't dwell anywhere as yet--except, my
poor Henry," she murmured, rising to move toward him, and softly laying
her hand on his bent shoulder--"except on your distress and misery--on
the very part I can't yet talk of, can't question you about...."

He let her hand rest there a moment; then he turned, and drawing it into
his own tremulous fingers, pressed it silently, with a clinging
helpless grasp that drew the tears to her eyes.

* * * * *

Justine Brent, in her earliest girlhood, had gone through one of those
emotional experiences that are the infantile diseases of the heart. She
had fancied herself beloved of a youth of her own age; had secretly
returned his devotion, and had seen it reft from her by another. Such an
incident, as inevitable as the measles, sometimes, like that mild
malady, leaves traces out of all proportion to its actual virulence. The
blow fell on Justine with tragic suddenness, and she reeled under it,
thinking darkly of death, and renouncing all hopes of future happiness.
Her ready pen often beguiled her into recording her impressions, and she
now found an escape from despair in writing the history of a damsel
similarly wronged. In her tale, the heroine killed herself; but the
author, saved by this vicarious sacrifice, lived, and in time even
smiled over her manuscript.

It was many years since Justine Amherst had recalled this youthful
incident; but the memory of it recurred to her as she turned from Mr.
Langhope's door. For a moment death seemed the easiest escape from what
confronted her; but though she could no longer medicine her despair by
turning it into fiction, she knew at once that she must somehow
transpose it into terms of action, that she must always escape from
life into more life, and not into its negation.

She had been carried into Mr. Langhope's presence by that expiatory
passion which still burns so high, and draws its sustenance from so deep
down, in the unsleeping hearts of women. Though she had never wavered in
her conviction that her act had been justified her ideas staggered under
the sudden comprehension of its consequences. Not till that morning had
she seen those consequences in their terrible, unsuspected extent, had
she understood how one stone rashly loosened from the laboriously
erected structure of human society may produce remote fissures in that
clumsy fabric. She saw that, having hazarded the loosening of the stone,
she should have held herself apart from ordinary human ties, like some
priestess set apart for the service of the temple. And instead, she had
seized happiness with both hands, taken it as the gift of the very fate
she had herself precipitated! She remembered some old Greek saying to
the effect that the gods never forgive the mortal who presumes to love
and suffer like a god. She had dared to do both, and the gods were
bringing ruin on that deeper self which had its life in those about her.

So much had become clear to her when she heard Amherst declare his
intention of laying the facts before Mr. Langhope. His few broken words
lit up the farthest verge of their lives. She saw that his
retrospective reverence for his wife's memory, which was far as possible
removed from the strong passion of the mind and senses that bound him to
herself, was indelibly stained and desecrated by the discovery that all
he had received from the one woman had been won for him by the
deliberate act of the other. This was what no reasoning, no appeal to
the calmer judgment, could ever, in his inmost thoughts, undo or
extenuate. It could find appeasement only in the renunciation of all
that had come to him from Bessy; and this renunciation, so different
from the mere sacrifice of material well-being, was bound up with
consequences so far-reaching, so destructive to the cause which had
inspired his whole life, that Justine felt the helpless terror of the
mortal who has launched one of the heavenly bolts.

She could think of no way of diverting it but the way she had chosen.
She must see Mr. Langhope first, must clear Amherst of the least faint
association with her act or her intention. And to do this she must
exaggerate, not her own compunction--for she could not depart from the
exact truth in reporting her feelings and convictions--but her husband's
first instinctive movement of horror, the revulsion of feeling her
confession had really produced in him. This was the most painful part of
her task, and for this reason her excited imagination clothed it with a
special expiatory value. If she could purchase Amherst's peace of mind,
and the security of his future, by confessing, and even
over-emphasizing, the momentary estrangement between them there would be
a bitter joy in such payment!

Her hour with Mr. Langhope proved the correctness of her intuition. She
could save Amherst only by effacing herself from his life: those about
him would be only too ready to let her bear the full burden of obloquy.
She could see that, for a dozen reasons, Mr. Langhope, even in the first
shock of his dismay, unconsciously craved a way of exonerating Amherst,
of preserving intact the relation on which so much of his comfort had
come to depend. And she had the courage to make the most of his desire,
to fortify it by isolating Amherst's point of view from hers; so that,
when the hour was over, she had the solace of feeling that she had
completely freed him from any conceivable consequence of her act.

So far, the impetus of self-sacrifice had carried her straight to her
goal; but, as frequently happens with such atoning impulses, it left her
stranded just short of any subsequent plan of conduct. Her next step,
indeed, was clear enough: she must return to Hanaford, explain to her
husband that she had felt impelled to tell her own story to Mr.
Langhope, and then take up her ordinary life till chance offered her a
pretext for fulfilling her promise. But what pretext was likely to
present itself? No symbolic horn would sound the hour of fulfillment;
she must be her own judge, and hear the call in the depths of her own
conscience.

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