The Fruit of the Tree: Chapter 41

Chapter 41

AMHERST, Cicely's convalescence once assured, had been obliged to go
back to Hanaford; but some ten days later, on hearing from Mrs. Ansell
that the little girl's progress was less rapid than had been hoped, he
returned to his father-in-law's for a Sunday.

He came two days after the talk recorded in the last chapter--a talk of
which Mrs. Ansell's letter to him had been the direct result. She had
promised Mr. Langhope that, in writing to Amherst, she would not go
beyond the briefest statement of fact; and she had kept her word,
trusting to circumstances to speak for her.

Mrs. Ansell, during Cicely's illness, had formed the habit of dropping
in on Mr. Langhope at the tea hour instead of awaiting him in her own
drawing-room; and on the Sunday in question she found him alone.
Beneath his pleasure in seeing her, which had grown more marked as his
dependence on her increased, she at once discerned traces of recent
disturbance; and her first question was for Cicely.

He met it with a discouraged gesture. "No great change--Amherst finds
her less well than when he was here before."

"He's upstairs with her?"

"Yes--she seems to want him."

Mrs. Ansell seated herself in silence behind the tea-tray, of which she
was now recognized as the officiating priestess. As she drew off her
long gloves, and mechanically straightened the row of delicate old cups,
Mr. Langhope added with an effort: "I've spoken to him--told him what
you said."

She looked up quickly.

"About the child's wish," he continued. "About her having written to his
wife. It seems her last letters have not been answered."

He paused, and Mrs. Ansell, with her usual calm precision, proceeded to
measure the tea into the fluted Georgian tea-pot. She could be as
reticent in approval as in reprehension, and not for the world would she
have seemed to claim any share in the turn that events appeared to be
taking. She even preferred the risk of leaving her old friend to add
half-reproachfully: "I told Amherst what you and the nurse thought."

"Yes?"

"That Cicely pines for his wife. I put it to him in black and white."
The words came out on a deep strained breath, and Mrs. Ansell faltered:
"Well?"

"Well--he doesn't know where she is himself."

"Doesn't _know_?"

"They're separated--utterly separated. It's as I told you: he could
hardly name her."

Mrs. Ansell had unconsciously ceased her ministrations, letting her
hands fall on her knee while she brooded in blank wonder on her
companion's face.

"I wonder what reason she could have given him?" she murmured at length.

"For going? He loathes her, I tell you!"

"Yes--but _how did she make him_?"

He struck his hand violently on the arm of his chair. "Upon my soul, you
seem to forget!"

"No." She shook her head with a half smile. "I simply remember more than
you do."

"What more?" he began with a flush of anger; but she raised a quieting
hand.

"What does all that matter--if, now that we need her, we can't get her?"

He made no answer, and she returned to the dispensing of his tea; but as
she rose to put the cup in his hand he asked, half querulously: "You
think it's going to be very bad for the child, then?"

Mrs. Ansell smiled with the thin edge of her lips. "One can hardly set
the police after her----!"

"No; we're powerless," he groaned in assent.

As the cup passed between them she dropped her eyes to his with a quick
flash of interrogation; but he sat staring moodily before him, and she
moved back to the sofa without a word.

* * * * *

On the way downstairs she met Amherst descending from Cicely's room.

Since the early days of his first marriage there had always been, on
Amherst's side, a sense of obscure antagonism toward Mrs. Ansell. She
was almost the embodied spirit of the world he dreaded and disliked: her
serenity, her tolerance, her adaptability, seemed to smile away and
disintegrate all the high enthusiasms, the stubborn convictions, that he
had tried to plant in the shifting sands of his married life. And now
that Bessy's death had given her back the attributes with which his
fancy had originally invested her, he had come to regard Mrs. Ansell as
embodying the evil influences that had come between himself and his
wife.

Mrs. Ansell was probably not unaware of the successive transitions of
feeling which had led up to this unflattering view; but her life had
been passed among petty rivalries and animosities, and she had the
patience and adroitness of the spy in a hostile camp.

She and Amherst exchanged a few words about Cicely; then she exclaimed,
with a glance through the panes of the hall door: "But I must be
off--I'm on foot, and the crossings appal me after dark."

He could do no less, at that, than offer to guide her across the perils
of Fifth Avenue; and still talking of Cicely, she led him down the
thronged thoroughfare till her own corner was reached, and then her own
door; turning there to ask, as if by an afterthought: "Won't you come
up? There's one thing more I want to say."

A shade of reluctance crossed his face, which, as the vestibule light
fell on it, looked hard and tired, like a face set obstinately against a
winter gale; but he murmured a word of assent, and followed her into the
shining steel cage of the lift.

In her little drawing-room, among the shaded lamps and bowls of spring
flowers, she pushed a chair forward, settled herself in her usual corner
of the sofa, and said with a directness that seemed an echo of his own
tone: "I asked you to come up because I want to talk to you about Mr.
Langhope."

Amherst looked at her in surprise. Though his father-in-law's health had
been more or less unsatisfactory for the last year, all their concern,
of late, had been for Cicely.

"You think him less well?" he enquired.

She waited to draw off and smooth her gloves, with one of the
deliberate gestures that served to shade and supplement her speech.

"I think him extremely unhappy."

Amherst moved uneasily in his seat. He did not know where she meant the
talk to lead them, but he guessed that it would be over painful places,
and he saw no reason why he should be forced to follow her.

"You mean that he's still anxious about Cicely?"

"Partly that--yes." She paused. "The child will get well, no doubt; but
she is very lonely. She needs youth, heat, light. Mr. Langhope can't
give her those, or even a semblance of them; and it's an art I've lost
the secret of," she added with her shadowy smile.

Amherst's brows darkened. "I realize all she has lost----"

Mrs. Ansell glanced up at him quickly. "She is twice motherless," she
said.

The blood rose to his neck and temples, and he tightened his hand on the
arm of his chair. But it was a part of Mrs. Ansell's expertness to know
when such danger signals must be heeded and when they might be ignored,
and she went on quietly: "It's the question of the future that is
troubling Mr. Langhope. After such an illness, the next months of
Cicely's life should be all happiness. And money won't buy the kind she
needs: one can't pick out the right companion for such a child as one
can match a ribbon. What she wants is spontaneous affection, not the
most superlative manufactured article. She wants the sort of love that
Justine gave her."

It was the first time in months that Amherst had heard his wife's name
spoken outside of his own house. No one but his mother mentioned Justine
to him now; and of late even his mother had dropped her enquiries and
allusions, prudently acquiescing in the habit of silence which his own
silence had created about him. To hear the name again--the two little
syllables which had been the key of life to him, and now shook him as
the turning of a rusted lock shakes a long-closed door--to hear her name
spoken familiarly, affectionately, as one speaks of some one who may
come into the room the next moment--gave him a shock that was half pain,
and half furtive unacknowledged joy. Men whose conscious thoughts are
mostly projected outward, on the world of external activities, may be
more moved by such a touch on the feelings than those who are
perpetually testing and tuning their emotional chords. Amherst had
foreseen from the first that Mrs. Ansell might mean to speak of his
wife; but though he had intended, if she did so, to cut their talk
short, he now felt himself irresistibly constrained to hear her out.

Mrs. Ansell, having sped her shaft, followed its flight through lowered
lashes, and saw that it had struck a vulnerable point; but she was far
from assuming that the day was won.

"I believe," she continued, "that Mr. Langhope has said something of
this to you already, and my only excuse for speaking is that I
understood he had not been successful in his appeal."

No one but Mrs. Ansell--and perhaps she knew it--could have pushed so
far beyond the conventional limits of discretion without seeming to
overstep them by a hair; and she had often said, when pressed for the
secret of her art, that it consisted simply in knowing the pass-word.
That word once spoken, she might have added, the next secret was to give
the enemy no time for resistance; and though she saw the frown reappear
between Amherst's eyes, she went on, without heeding it: "I entreat you,
Mr. Amherst, to let Cicely see your wife."

He reddened again, and pushed back his chair, as if to rise.

"No--don't break off like that! Let me say a word more. I know your
answer to Mr. Langhope--that you and Justine are no longer together. But
I thought of you as a man to sink your personal relations at such a
moment as this."

"To sink them?" he repeated vaguely: and she went on: "After all, what
difference does it make?"

"What difference?" He stared in unmitigated wonder, and then answered,
with a touch of irony: "It might at least make the difference of my
being unwilling to ask a favour of her."

Mrs. Ansell, at this, raised her eyes and let them rest full on his.
"Because she has done you so great a one already?"

He stared again, sinking back automatically into his chair. "I don't
understand you."

"No." She smiled a little, as if to give herself time. "But I mean that
you shall. If I were a man I suppose I couldn't, because a man's code of
honour is such a clumsy cast-iron thing. But a woman's, luckily, can be
cut over--if she's clever--to fit any new occasion; and in this case I
should be willing to reduce mine to tatters if necessary."

Amherst's look of bewilderment deepened. "What is it that I don't
understand?" he asked at length, in a low voice.

"Well--first of all, why Mr. Langhope had the right to ask you to send
for your wife."

"The right?"

"You don't recognize such a right on his part?"

"No--why should I?"

"Supposing she had left you by his wish?"

"His wish? _His----?_"

He was on his feet now, gazing at her blindly, while the solid world
seemed to grow thin about him. Her next words reduced it to a mist.

"My poor Amherst--why else, on earth, should she have left you?"

She brought it out clearly, in her small chiming tones; and as the sound
travelled toward him it seemed to gather momentum, till her words rang
through his brain as if every incomprehensible incident in the past had
suddenly boomed forth the question. Why else, indeed, should she have
left him? He stood motionless for a while; then he approached Mrs.
Ansell and said: "Tell me."

She drew farther back into her corner of the sofa, waving him to a seat
beside her, as though to bring his inquisitory eyes on a level where her
own could command them; but he stood where he was, unconscious of her
gesture, and merely repeating: "Tell me."

She may have said to herself that a woman would have needed no farther
telling; but to him she only replied, slanting her head up to his: "To
spare you and himself pain--to keep everything, between himself and you,
as it had been before you married her."

He dropped down beside her at that, grasping the back of the sofa as if
he wanted something to clutch and throttle. The veins swelled in his
temples, and as he pushed back his tossed hair Mrs. Ansell noticed for
the first time how gray it had grown on the under side.

"And he asked this of my wife--he accepted it?'"

"Haven't _you_ accepted it?"

"I? How could I guess her reasons--how could I imagine----?"

Mrs. Ansell raised her brows a hair's breadth at that. "I don't know.
But as a fact, he didn't ask--it was she who offered, who forced it on
him, even!"

"Forced her going on him?"

"In a sense, yes; by making it appear that _you_ felt as he did
about--about poor Bessy's death: that the thought of what had happened
at that time was as abhorrent to you as to him--that _she_ was as
abhorrent to you. No doubt she foresaw that, had she permitted the least
doubt on that point, there would have been no need of her leaving you,
since the relation between yourself and Mr. Langhope would have been
altered--destroyed...."

"Yes. I expected that--I warned her of it. But how did she make him
think----?"

"How can I tell? To begin with, I don't know your real feeling. For all
I know she was telling the truth--and Mr. Langhope of course thought she
was."

"That I abhorred her? Oh----" he broke out, on his feet in an instant.

"Then why----?"

"Why did I let her leave me?" He strode across the room, as his habit
was in moments of agitation, turning back to her again before he
answered. "Because I _didn't_ know--didn't know anything! And because
her insisting on going away like that, without any explanation, made me
feel...imagine there was...something she didn't _want_ me to
know...something she was afraid of not being able to hide from me if we
stayed together any longer."

"Well--there was: the extent to which she loved you."

Mrs. Ansell; her hands clasped on her knee, her gaze holding his with a
kind of visionary fixity, seemed to reconstruct the history of his past,
bit by bit, with the words she was dragging out of him.

"I see it--I see it all now," she went on, with a repressed fervour that
he had never divined in her. "It was the only solution for her, as well
as for the rest of you. The more she showed her love, the more it would
have cast a doubt on her motive...the greater distance she would have
put between herself and you. And so she showed it in the only way that
was safe for both of you, by taking herself away and hiding it in her
heart; and before going, she secured your peace of mind, your future. If
she ruined anything, she rebuilt the ruin. Oh, she paid--she paid in
full!"

Justine had paid, yes--paid to the utmost limit of whatever debt toward
society she had contracted by overstepping its laws. And her resolve to
discharge the debt had been taken in a flash, as soon as she had seen
that man can commit no act alone, whether for good or evil. The extent
to which Amherst's fate was involved in hers had become clear to her
with his first word of reassurance, of faith in her motive. And
instantly a plan for releasing him had leapt full-formed into her mind,
and had been carried out with swift unflinching resolution. As he forced
himself, now, to look down the suddenly illuminated past to the weeks
which had elapsed between her visit to Mr. Langhope and her departure
from Hanaford, he wondered not so much at her swiftness of resolve as at
her firmness in carrying out her plan--and he saw, with a blinding flash
of insight, that it was in her love for him that she had found her
strength.

In all moments of strong mental tension he became totally unconscious of
time and place, and he now remained silent so long, his hands clasped
behind him, his eyes fixed on an indeterminate point in space, that Mrs.
Ansell at length rose and laid a questioning touch on his arm.

"It's not true that you don't know where she is?" His face contracted.
"At this moment I don't. Lately she has preferred...not to write...."

"But surely you must know how to find her?"

He tossed back his hair with an energetic movement. "I should find her
if I didn't know how!"

They stood confronted in a gaze of silent intensity, each penetrating
farther into the mind of the other than would once have seemed possible
to either one; then Amherst held out his hand abruptly. "Good-bye--and
thank you," he said.

She detained him a moment. "We shall see you soon again--see you both?"

His face grew stern. "It's not to oblige Mr. Langhope that I am going to
find my wife."

"Ah, now you are unjust to him!" she exclaimed.

"Don't let us speak of him!" he broke in.

"Why not? When it is from him the request comes--the entreaty--that
everything in the past should be forgotten?"

"Yes--when it suits his convenience!"

"Do you imagine that--even judging him in that way--it has not cost him
a struggle?"

"I can only think of what it has cost her!"

Mrs. Ansell drew a deep sighing breath. "Ah--but don't you see that she
has gained her point, and that nothing else matters to her?"

"Gained her point? Not if, by that, you mean that things here can ever
go back to the old state--that she and I can remain at Westmore after
this!"

Mrs. Ansell dropped her eyes for a moment; then she lifted to his her
sweet impenetrable face.

"Do you know what you have to do--both you and he? Exactly what she
decides," she affirmed.

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