The Fruit of the Tree: Chapter 43

Chapter 43

JUNE again at Hanaford--and Cicely's birthday. The anniversary was to
coincide, this year, with the opening of the old house at Hopewood, as a
kind of pleasure-palace--gymnasium, concert-hall and museum--for the
recreation of the mill-hands.

The idea had first come to Amherst on the winter afternoon when Bessy
Westmore had confessed her love for him under the snow-laden trees of
Hopewood. Even then the sense that his personal happiness was enlarged
and secured by its promise of happiness to others had made him wish that
the scene associated with the opening of his new life should be made to
commemorate a corresponding change in the fortunes of Westmore. But when
the control of the mills passed into his hands other and more necessary
improvements pressed upon him; and it was not till now that the
financial condition of the company had permitted the execution of his
plan.

Justine, on her return to Hanaford, had found the work already in
progress, and had been told by her husband that he was carrying out a
projected scheme of Bessy's. She had felt a certain surprise, but had
concluded that the plan in question dated back to the early days of his
first marriage, when, in his wife's eyes, his connection with the mills
still invested them with interest.

Since Justine had come back to her husband, both had tacitly avoided all
allusions to the past, and the recreation-house at Hopewood being, as
she divined, in some sort an expiatory offering to Bessy's plaintive
shade, she had purposely refrained from questioning Amherst about its
progress, and had simply approved the plans he submitted to her.

Fourteen months had passed since her return, and now, as she sat beside
her husband in the carriage which was conveying them to Hopewood, she
said to herself that her life had at last fallen into what promised to
be its final shape--that as things now were they would probably be to
the end. And outwardly at least they were what she and Amherst had
always dreamed of their being. Westmore prospered under the new rule.
The seeds of life they had sown there were springing up in a promising
growth of bodily health and mental activity, and above all in a dawning
social consciousness. The mill-hands were beginning to understand the
meaning of their work, in its relation to their own lives and to the
larger economy. And outwardly, also, the new growth was showing itself
in the humanized aspect of the place. Amherst's young maples were tall
enough now to cast a shade on the grass-bordered streets; and the
well-kept turf, the bright cottage gardens, the new central group of
library, hospital and club-house, gave to the mill-village the hopeful
air of a "rising" residential suburb.

In the bright June light, behind their fresh green mantle of trees and
creepers, even the factory buildings looked less stern and prison-like
than formerly; and the turfing and planting of the adjoining
river-banks had transformed a waste of foul mud and refuse into a little
park where the operatives might refresh themselves at midday.

Yes--Westmore was alive at last: the dead city of which Justine had once
spoken had risen from its grave, and its blank face had taken on a
meaning. As Justine glanced at her husband she saw that the same thought
was in his mind. However achieved, at whatever cost of personal misery
and error, the work of awakening and freeing Westmore was done, and that
work had justified itself.

She looked from Amherst to Cicely, who sat opposite, eager and rosy in
her mourning frock--for Mr. Langhope had died some two months
previously--and as intent as her step-parents on the scene before her.
Cicely was old enough now to regard her connection with Westmore as
something more than a nursery game. She was beginning to learn a great
deal about the mills, and to understand, in simple, friendly ways,
something of her own relation to them. The work and play of the
children, the interests and relaxations provided for their elders, had
been gradually explained to her by Justine, and she knew that this
shining tenth birthday of hers was to throw its light as far as the
clouds of factory-smoke extended.

As they mounted the slope to Hopewood, the spacious white building,
with its enfolding colonnades, its broad terraces and tennis-courts,
shone through the trees like some bright country-house adorned for its
master's home-coming; and Amherst and his wife might have been driving
up to the house which had been built to shelter their wedded happiness.
The thought flashed across Justine as their carriage climbed the hill.
She was as much absorbed as Amherst in the welfare of Westmore, it had
become more and more, to both, the refuge in which their lives still met
and mingled; but for a moment, as they paused before the flower-decked
porch, and he turned to help her from the carriage, it occurred to her
to wonder what her sensations would have been if he had been bringing
her home--to a real home of their own--instead of accompanying her to
another philanthropic celebration. But what need had they of a real
home, when they no longer had any real life of their own? Nothing was
left of that secret inner union which had so enriched and beautified
their outward lives. Since Justine's return to Hanaford they had
entered, tacitly, almost unconsciously, into a new relation to each
other: a relation in which their personalities were more and more merged
in their common work, so that, as it were, they met only by avoiding
each other.

From the first, Justine had accepted this as inevitable; just as she had
understood, when Amherst had sought her out in New York, that his
remaining at Westmore, which had once been contingent on her leaving
him, now depended on her willingness to return and take up their former
life.

She accepted the last condition as she had accepted the other, pledged
to the perpetual expiation of an act for which, in the abstract, she
still refused to hold herself to blame. But life is not a matter of
abstract principles, but a succession of pitiful compromises with fate,
of concessions to old tradition, old beliefs, old charities and
frailties. That was what her act had taught her--that was the word of
the gods to the mortal who had laid a hand on their bolts. And she had
humbled herself to accept the lesson, seeing human relations at last as
a tangled and deep-rooted growth, a dark forest through which the
idealist cannot cut his straight path without hearing at each stroke the
cry of the severed branch: "_Why woundest thou me?_"

* * * * *

The lawns leading up to the house were already sprinkled with
holiday-makers, while along the avenue came the rolling of wheels, the
throb of motor-cars; and Justine, with Cicely beside her, stood in the
wide hall to receive the incoming throng, in which Hanaford society was
indiscriminately mingled with the operatives in their Sunday best.

While his wife welcomed the new arrivals, Amherst, supported by some
young Westmore cousins, was guiding them into the concert-hall, where he
was to say a word on the uses of the building before declaring it open
for inspection. And presently Justine and Cicely, summoned by Westy
Gaines, made their way through the rows of seats to a corner near the
platform. Her husband was there already, with Halford Gaines and a group
of Hanaford dignitaries, and just below them sat Mrs. Gaines and her
daughters, the Harry Dressels, and Amherst's radiant mother.

As Justine passed between them, she wondered how much they knew of the
events which had wrought so profound and permanent change in her life.
She had never known how Hanaford explained her absence or what comments
it had made on her return. But she saw to-day more clearly than ever
that Amherst had become a power among his townsmen, and that if they
were still blind to the inner meaning of his work, its practical results
were beginning to impress them profoundly. Hanaford's sociological creed
was largely based on commercial considerations, and Amherst had won
Hanaford's esteem by the novel feat of defying its economic principles
and snatching success out of his defiance.

And now he had advanced a step or two in front of the "representative"
semi-circle on the platform, and was beginning to speak.

Justine did not hear his first words. She was looking up at him, trying
to see him with the eyes of the crowd, and wondering what manner of man
he would have seemed to her if she had known as little as they did of
his inner history.

He held himself straight, the heavy locks thrown back from his forehead,
one hand resting on the table beside him, the other grasping a folded
blue-print which the architect of the building had just advanced to give
him. As he stood there, Justine recalled her first sight of him in the
Hope Hospital, five years earlier--was it only five years? They had
dealt deep strokes to his face, hollowing the eye-sockets, accentuating
the strong modelling of nose and chin, fixing the lines between the
brows; but every touch had a meaning--it was not the languid hand of
time which had remade his features, but the sharp chisel of thought and
action.

She roused herself suddenly to the consciousness of what he was saying.

"For the idea of this building--of a building dedicated to the
recreation of Westmore--is not new in my mind; but while it remained
there as a mere idea, it had already, without my knowledge, taken
definite shape in the thoughts of the owner of Westmore."

There was a slight drop in his voice as he designated Bessy, and he
waited a moment before continuing: "It was not till after the death of
my first wife that I learned of her intention--that I found by
accident, among her papers, this carefully-studied plan for a
pleasure-house at Hopewood."

He paused again, and unrolling the blue-print, held it up before his
audience.

"You cannot, at this distance," he went on, "see all the admirable
details of her plan; see how beautifully they were imagined, how
carefully and intelligently elaborated. She who conceived them longed to
see beauty everywhere--it was her dearest wish to bestow it on her
people here. And her ardent imagination outran the bounds of practical
possibility. We cannot give you, in its completeness, the beautiful
thing she had imagined--the great terraces, the marble porches, the
fountains, lily-tanks, and cloisters. But you will see that, wherever it
was possible--though in humbler materials, and on a smaller scale--we
have faithfully followed her design; and when presently you go through
this building, and when, hereafter, you find health and refreshment and
diversion here, I ask you to remember the beauty she dreamed of giving
you, and to let the thought of it make her memory beautiful among you
and among your children...."

Justine had listened with deepening amazement. She was seated so close
to her husband that she had recognized the blue-print the moment he
unrolled it. There was no mistaking its origin--it was simply the plan
of the gymnasium which Bessy had intended to build at Lynbrook, and
which she had been constrained to abandon owing to her husband's
increased expenditure at the mills. But how was it possible that Amherst
knew nothing of the original purpose of the plans, and by what mocking
turn of events had a project devised in deliberate defiance of his
wishes, and intended to declare his wife's open contempt for them, been
transformed into a Utopian vision for the betterment of the Westmore
operatives?

A wave of anger swept over Justine at this last derisive stroke of fate.
It was grotesque and pitiable that a man like Amherst should create out
of his regrets a being who had never existed, and then ascribe to her
feelings and actions of which the real woman had again and again proved
herself incapable!

Ah, no, Justine had suffered enough--but to have this imaginary Bessy
called from the grave, dressed in a semblance of self-devotion and
idealism, to see her petty impulses of vindictiveness disguised as the
motions of a lofty spirit--it was as though her small malicious ghost
had devised this way of punishing the wife who had taken her place!

Justine had suffered enough--suffered deliberately and unstintingly,
paying the full price of her error, not seeking to evade its least
consequence. But no sane judgment could ask her to sit quiet under this
last hallucination. What! This unreal woman, this phantom that
Amherst's uneasy imagination had evoked, was to come between himself and
her, to supplant her first as his wife, and then as his fellow-worker?
Why should she not cry out the truth to him, defend herself against the
dead who came back to rob her of such wedded peace as was hers? She had
only to tell the true story of the plans to lay poor Bessy's ghost
forever!

The confused throbbing impulses within her were stifled under a long
burst of applause--then she saw Westy Gaines at her side again, and
understood that he had come to lead Cicely to the platform. For a moment
she clung jealously to the child's hand, hardly aware of what she did,
feeling only that she was being thrust farther and farther into the
background of the life she had helped to call out of chaos. Then a
contrary impulse moved her. She gently freed Cicely's hand, and a moment
later, as she sat with bent head and throbbing breast, she heard the
child's treble piping out above her:

"In my mother's name, I give this house to Westmore."

Applause again--and then Justine found herself enveloped in a general
murmur of compliment and congratulation. Mr. Amherst had spoken
admirably--a "beautiful tribute--" ah, he had done poor Bessy justice!
And to think that till now Hanaford had never fully known how she had
the welfare of the mills at heart--how it was really only _her_ work
that he was carrying on there! Well, he had made that perfectly
clear--and no doubt Cicely was being taught to follow in her mother's
footsteps: everyone had noticed how her step-father was associating her
with the work at the mills. And his little speech would, as it were,
consecrate the child's relation to that work, make it appear to her as
the continuance of a beautiful, a sacred tradition....

* * * * *

And now it was over. The building had been inspected, the operatives had
dispersed, the Hanaford company had rolled off down the avenue, Cicely,
among them, driving away tired and happy in Mrs. Dressel's victoria, and
Amherst and his wife were alone.

Amherst, after bidding good-bye to his last guests, had gone back to the
empty concert-room to fetch the blue-print lying on the platform. He
came back with it, between the uneven rows of empty chairs, and joined
Justine, who stood waiting in the hall. His face was slightly flushed,
and his eyes had the light which in happy moments burned through their
veil of thought.

He laid his hand on his wife's arm, and drawing her toward a table
spread out the blueprint before her.

"You haven't seen this, have you?" he said.

She looked down at the plan without answering, reading in the left-hand
corner the architect's conventional inscription: "Swimming-tank and
gymnasium designed for Mrs. John Amherst."

Amherst looked up, perhaps struck by her silence.

"But perhaps you _have_ seen it--at Lynbrook? It must have been done
while you were there."

The quickened throb of her blood rushed to her brain like a signal.
"Speak--speak now!" the signal commanded.

Justine continued to look fixedly at the plan. "Yes, I have seen it,"
she said at length.

"At Lynbrook?"

"At Lynbrook."

"_She_ showed it to you, I suppose--while I was away?"

Justine hesitated again. "Yes, while you were away."

"And did she tell you anything about it, go into details about her
wishes, her intentions?"

Now was the moment--now! As her lips parted she looked up at her
husband. The illumination still lingered on his face--and it was the
face she loved. He was waiting eagerly for her next word.

"No, I heard no details. I merely saw the plan lying there."

She saw his look of disappointment. "She never told you about it?"

"No--she never told me."

It was best so, after all. She understood that now. It was now at last
that she was paying her full price.

Amherst rolled up the plan with a sigh and pushed it into the drawer of
the table. It struck her that he too had the look of one who has laid a
ghost. He turned to her and drew her hand through his arm.

"You're tired, dear. You ought to have driven back with the others," he
said.

"No, I would rather stay with you."

"You want to drain this good day to the dregs, as I do?"

"Yes," she murmured, drawing her hand away.

"It _is_ a good day, isn't it?" he continued, looking about him at the
white-panelled walls, the vista of large bright rooms seen through the
folding doors. "I feel as if we had reached a height, somehow--a height
where one might pause and draw breath for the next climb. Don't you feel
that too, Justine?"

"Yes--I feel it."

"Do you remember once, long ago--one day when you and I and Cicely went
on a picnic to hunt orchids--how we got talking of the one best moment
in life--the moment when one wanted most to stop the clock?"

The colour rose in her face while he spoke. It was a long time since he
had referred to the early days of their friendship--the days
_before_....

"Yes, I remember," she said.

"And do you remember how we said that it was with most of us as it was
with Faust? That the moment one wanted to hold fast to was not, in most
lives, the moment of keenest personal happiness, but the other kind--the
kind that would have seemed grey and colourless at first: the moment
when the meaning of life began to come out from the mists--when one
could look out at last over the marsh one had drained?"

A tremor ran through Justine. "It was you who said that," she said,
half-smiling.

"But didn't you feel it with me? Don't you now?"

"Yes--I do now," she murmured.

He came close to her, and taking her hands in his, kissed them one after
the other.

"Dear," he said, "let us go out and look at the marsh we have drained."

He turned and led her through the open doorway to the terrace above the
river. The sun was setting behind the wooded slopes of Hopewood, and the
trees about the house stretched long blue shadows across the lawn.
Beyond them rose the smoke of Westmore.

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