XIX
IT was late in October when Amherst returned to Lynbrook.
He had begun to learn, in the interval, the lesson most difficult to his
direct and trenchant nature: that compromise is the law of married life.
On the afternoon of his talk with his wife he had sought her out,
determined to make a final effort to clear up the situation between
them; but he learned that, immediately after luncheon, she had gone off
in the motor with Mrs. Carbury and two men of the party, leaving word
that they would probably not be back till evening. It cost Amherst a
struggle, when he had humbled himself to receive this information from
the butler, not to pack his portmanteau and take the first train for
Hanaford; but he was still under the influence of Justine Brent's words,
and also of his own feeling that, at this juncture, a break between
himself and Bessy would be final.
He stayed on accordingly, enduring as best he might the mute observation
of the household, and the gentle irony of Mr. Langhope's attentions; and
before he left Lynbrook, two days later, a provisional understanding had
been reached.
His wife proved more firm than he had foreseen in her resolve to regain
control of her income, and the talk between them ended in reciprocal
concessions, Bessy consenting to let the town house for the winter and
remain at Lynbrook, while Amherst agreed to restrict his improvements at
Westmore to such alterations as had already been begun, and to reduce
the expenditure on these as much as possible. It was virtually the
defeat of his policy, and he had to suffer the decent triumph of the
Gaineses, as well as the bitterer pang of his foiled aspirations. In
spite of the opposition of the directors, he had taken advantage of
Truscomb's resignation to put Duplain at the head of the mills; but the
new manager's outspoken disgust at the company's change of plan made it
clear that he would not remain long at Westmore, and it was one of the
miseries of Amherst's situation that he could not give the reasons for
his defection, but must bear to figure in Duplain's terse vocabulary as
a "quitter." The difficulty of finding a new manager expert enough to
satisfy the directors, yet in sympathy with his own social theories,
made Amherst fear that Duplain's withdrawal would open the way for
Truscomb's reinstatement, an outcome on which he suspected Halford
Gaines had always counted; and this possibility loomed before him as the
final defeat of his hopes.
Meanwhile the issues ahead had at least the merit of keeping him busy.
The task of modifying and retrenching his plans contrasted drearily with
the hopeful activity of the past months, but he had an iron capacity for
hard work under adverse conditions, and the fact of being too busy for
thought helped him to wear through the days. This pressure of work
relieved him, at first, from too close consideration of his relation to
Bessy. He had yielded up his dearest hopes at her wish, and for the
moment his renunciation had set a chasm between them; but gradually he
saw that, as he was patching together the ruins of his Westmore plans,
so he must presently apply himself to the reconstruction of his married
life.
Before leaving Lynbrook he had had a last word with Miss Brent; not a
word of confidence--for the same sense of reserve kept both from any
explicit renewal of their moment's intimacy--but one of those exchanges
of commonplace phrase that circumstances may be left to charge with
special meaning. Justine had merely asked if he were really leaving and,
on his assenting, had exclaimed quickly: "But you will come back soon?"
"I shall certainly come back," he answered; and after a pause he added:
"I shall find you here? You will remain at Lynbrook?"
On her part also there was a shade of hesitation; then she said with a
smile: "Yes, I shall stay."
His look brightened. "And you'll write me if anything--if Bessy should
not be well?"
"I will write you," she promised; and a few weeks after his return to
Hanaford he had, in fact, received a short note from her. Its ostensible
purpose was to reassure him as to Bessy's health, which had certainly
grown stronger since Dr. Wyant had persuaded her, at the close of the
last house-party, to accord herself a period of quiet; but (the writer
added) now that Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell had also left, the quiet
was perhaps too complete, and Bessy's nerves were beginning to suffer
from the reaction.
Amherst had no difficulty in interpreting this brief communication. "I
have succeeded in dispersing the people who are always keeping you and
your wife apart; now is your chance: come and take it." That was what
Miss Brent's letter meant; and his answer was a telegram to Bessy,
announcing his return to Long Island.
The step was not an easy one; but decisive action, however hard, was
always easier to Amherst than the ensuing interval of readjustment. To
come to Lynbrook had required a strong effort of will; but the effort of
remaining there called into play less disciplined faculties.
Amherst had always been used to doing things; now he had to resign
himself to enduring a state of things. The material facilities of the
life about him, the way in which the machinery of the great empty house
ran on like some complex apparatus working in the void, increased the
exasperation of his nerves. Dr. Wyant's suggestion--which Amherst
suspected Justine of having prompted--that Mrs. Amherst should cancel
her autumn engagements, and give herself up to a quiet outdoor life with
her husband, seemed to present the very opportunity these two distracted
spirits needed to find and repossess each other. But, though Amherst was
grateful to Bessy for having dismissed her visitors--partly to please
him, as he guessed--yet he found the routine of the establishment more
oppressive than when the house was full. If he could have been alone
with her in a quiet corner--the despised cottage at Westmore, even!--he
fancied they might still have been brought together by restricted space
and the familiar exigencies of life. All the primitive necessities which
bind together, through their recurring daily wants, natures fated to
find no higher point of union, had been carefully eliminated from the
life at Lynbrook, where material needs were not only provided for but
anticipated by a hidden mechanism that filled the house with the
perpetual sense of invisible attendance. Though Amherst knew that he and
Bessy could never meet in the region of great issues, he thought he
might have regained the way to her heart, and found relief from his own
inaction, in the small ministrations of daily life; but the next moment
he smiled to picture Bessy in surroundings where the clocks were not
wound of themselves and the doors did not fly open at her approach.
Those thick-crowding cares and drudgeries which serve as merciful
screens between so many discordant natures would have been as
intolerable to her as was to Amherst the great glare of leisure in which
he and she were now confronted.
He saw that Bessy was in the state of propitiatory eagerness which
always followed on her gaining a point in their long duel; and he could
guess that she was tremulously anxious not only to make up to him, by
all the arts she knew, for the sacrifice she had exacted, but also to
conceal from every one the fact that, as Mr. Langhope bluntly put it, he
had been "brought to terms." Amherst was touched by her efforts, and
half-ashamed of his own inability to respond to them. But his mind,
released from its normal preoccupations, had become a dangerous
instrument of analysis and disintegration, and conditions which, a few
months before, he might have accepted with the wholesome tolerance of
the busy man, now pressed on him unendurably. He saw that he and his
wife were really face to face for the first time since their marriage.
Hitherto something had always intervened between them--first the spell
of her grace and beauty, and the brief joy of her participation in his
work; then the sorrow of their child's death, and after that the
temporary exhilaration of carrying out his ideas at Westmore--but now
that the last of these veils had been torn away they faced each other as
strangers.
* * * * *
The habit of keeping factory hours always drove Amherst forth long
before his wife's day began, and in the course of one of his early
tramps he met Miss Brent and Cicely setting out for a distant swamp
where rumour had it that a rare native orchid might be found. Justine's
sylvan tastes had developed in the little girl a passion for such
pillaging expeditions, and Cicely, who had discovered that her
step-father knew almost as much about birds and squirrels as Miss Brent
did about flowers, was not to be appeased till Amherst had scrambled
into the pony-cart, wedging his long legs between a fern-box and a
lunch-basket, and balancing a Scotch terrier's telescopic body across
his knees.
The season was so mild that only one or two light windless frosts had
singed the foliage of oaks and beeches, and gilded the roadsides with a
smooth carpeting of maple leaves. The morning haze rose like smoke from
burnt-out pyres of sumach and sugar-maple; a silver bloom lay on the
furrows of the ploughed fields; and now and then, as they drove on, the
wooded road showed at its end a tarnished disk of light, where sea and
sky were merged.
At length they left the road for a winding track through scrub-oaks and
glossy thickets of mountain-laurel; the track died out at the foot of a
wooded knoll, and clambering along its base they came upon the swamp.
There it lay in charmed solitude, shut in by a tawny growth of larch and
swamp-maple, its edges burnt out to smouldering shades of russet,
ember-red and ashen-grey, while the quaking centre still preserved a
jewel-like green, where hidden lanes of moisture wound between islets
tufted with swamp-cranberry and with the charred browns of fern and wild
rose and bay. Sodden earth and decaying branches gave forth a strange
sweet odour, as of the aromatic essences embalming a dead summer; and
the air charged with this scent was so still that the snapping of
witch-hazel pods, the drop of a nut, the leap of a startled frog,
pricked the silence with separate points of sound.
The pony made fast, the terrier released, and fern-box and lunch-basket
slung over Amherst's shoulder, the three explorers set forth on their
journey. Amherst, as became his sex, went first; but after a few
absent-minded plunges into the sedgy depths between the islets, he was
ordered to relinquish his command and fall to the rear, where he might
perform the humbler service of occasionally lifting Cicely over
unspannable gulfs of moisture.
Justine, leading the way, guided them across the treacherous surface as
fearlessly as a king-fisher, lighting instinctively on every
grass-tussock and submerged tree-stump of the uncertain path. Now and
then she paused, her feet drawn close on their narrow perch, and her
slender body swaying over as she reached down for some rare growth
detected among the withered reeds and grasses; then she would right
herself again by a backward movement as natural as the upward spring of
a branch--so free and flexible in all her motions that she seemed akin
to the swaying reeds and curving brambles which caught at her as she
passed.
At length the explorers reached the mossy corner where the orchids grew,
and Cicely, securely balanced on a fallen tree-trunk, was allowed to dig
the coveted roots. When they had been packed away, it was felt that this
culminating moment must be celebrated with immediate libations of jam
and milk; and having climbed to a dry slope among the pepper-bushes, the
party fell on the contents of the lunch-basket. It was just the hour
when Bessy's maid was carrying her breakfast-tray, with its delicate
service of old silver and porcelain, into the darkened bed-room at
Lynbrook; but early rising and hard scrambling had whetted the appetites
of the naturalists, and the nursery fare which Cicely spread before
them seemed a sumptuous reward for their toil.
"I do like this kind of picnic much better than the ones where mother
takes all the footmen, and the mayonnaise has to be scraped off things
before I can eat them," Cicely declared, lifting her foaming mouth from
a beaker of milk.
Amherst, lighting his pipe, stretched himself contentedly among the
pepper-bushes, steeped in that unreflecting peace which is shed into
some hearts by communion with trees and sky. He too was glad to get away
from the footmen and the mayonnaise, and he imagined that his
stepdaughter's exclamation summed up all the reasons for his happiness.
The boyish wood-craft which he had cultivated in order to encourage the
same taste in his factory lads came to life in this sudden return to
nature, and he redeemed his clumsiness in crossing the swamp by spying a
marsh-wren's nest that had escaped Justine, and detecting in a
swiftly-flitting olive-brown bird a belated tanager in autumn incognito.
Cicely sat rapt while he pictured the bird's winter pilgrimage, with
glimpses of the seas and islands that fled beneath him till his long
southern flight ended in the dim glades of the equatorial forests.
"Oh, what a good life--how I should like to be a wander-bird, and look
down people's chimneys twice a year!" Justine laughed, tilting her head
back to catch a last glimpse of the tanager.
The sun beamed full on their ledge from a sky of misty blue, and she had
thrown aside her hat, uncovering her thick waves of hair, blue-black in
the hollows, with warm rusty edges where they took the light. Cicely
dragged down a plumy spray of traveller's joy and wound it above her
friend's forehead; and thus wreathed, with her bright pallour relieved
against the dusky autumn tints, Justine looked like a wood-spirit who
had absorbed into herself the last golden juices of the year.
She leaned back laughing against a tree-trunk, pelting Cicely with
witch-hazel pods, making the terrier waltz for scraps of ginger-bread,
and breaking off now and then to imitate, with her clear full notes, the
call of some hidden marsh-bird, or the scolding chatter of a squirrel in
the scrub-oaks.
"Is that what you'd like most about the journey--looking down the
chimneys?" Amherst asked with a smile.
"Oh, I don't know--I should love it all! Think of the joy of skimming
over half the earth--seeing it born again out of darkness every morning!
Sometimes, when I've been up all night with a patient, and have seen the
world _come back to me_ like that, I've been almost mad with its beauty;
and then the thought that I've never seen more than a little corner of
it makes me feel as if I were chained. But I think if I had wings I
should choose to be a house-swallow; and then, after I'd had my fill of
wonders, I should come back to my familiar corner, and my house full of
busy humdrum people, and fly low to warn them of rain, and wheel up high
to show them it was good haying weather, and know what was going on in
every room in the house, and every house in the village; and all the
while I should be hugging my wonderful big secret--the secret of
snow-plains and burning deserts, and coral islands and buried
cities--and should put it all into my chatter under the eaves, that the
people in the house were always too busy to stop and listen to--and when
winter came I'm sure I should hate to leave them, even to go back to my
great Brazilian forests full of orchids and monkeys!"
"But, Justine, in winter you could take care of the monkeys," the
practical Cicely suggested.
"Yes--and that would remind me of home!" Justine cried, swinging about
to pinch the little girl's chin.
She was in one of the buoyant moods when the spirit of life caught her
in its grip, and shook and tossed her on its mighty waves as a sea-bird
is tossed through the spray of flying rollers. At such moments all the
light and music of the world seemed distilled into her veins, and forced
up in bubbles of laughter to her lips and eyes. Amherst had never seen
her thus, and he watched her with the sense of relaxation which the
contact of limpid gaiety brings to a mind obscured by failure and
self-distrust. The world was not so dark a place after all, if such
springs of merriment could well up in a heart as sensitive as hers to
the burden and toil of existence.
"Isn't it strange," she went on with a sudden drop to gravity, "that the
bird whose wings carry him farthest and show him the most wonderful
things, is the one who always comes back to the eaves, and is happiest
in the thick of everyday life?"
Her eyes met Amherst's. "It seems to me," he said, "that you're like
that yourself--loving long flights, yet happiest in the thick of life."
She raised her dark brows laughingly. "So I imagine--but then you see
I've never had the long flight!"
Amherst smiled. "Ah, there it is--one never knows--one never says, _This
is the moment_! because, however good it is, it always seems the door to
a better one beyond. Faust never said it till the end, when he'd nothing
left of all he began by thinking worth while; and then, with what a
difference it was said!"
She pondered. "Yes--but it _was_ the best, after all--the moment in
which he had nothing left...."
"Oh," Cicely broke in suddenly, "do look at the squirrel up there! See,
father--he's off! Let's follow him!"
As she crouched there, with head thrown back, and sparkling lips and
eyes, her fair hair--of her mother's very hue--making a shining haze
about her face, Amherst recalled the winter evening at Hopewood, when he
and Bessy had tracked the grey squirrel under the snowy beeches.
Scarcely three years ago--and how bitter memory had turned! A chilly
cloud spread over his spirit, reducing everything once more to the
leaden hue of reality....
"It's too late for any more adventures--we must be going," he said.
XX
AMHERST'S morning excursions with his step-daughter and Miss Brent
renewed themselves more than once. He welcomed any pretext for escaping
from the unprofitable round of his thoughts, and these woodland
explorations, with their gay rivalry of search for some rare plant or
elusive bird, and the contact with the child's happy wonder, and with
the morning brightness of Justine's mood, gave him his only moments of
self-forgetfulness.
But the first time that Cicely's chatter carried home an echo of their
adventures, Amherst saw a cloud on his wife's face. Her resentment of
Justine's influence over the child had long since subsided, and in the
temporary absence of the governess she was glad to have Cicely amused;
but she was never quite satisfied that those about her should have
pursuits and diversions in which she did not share. Her jealousy did not
concentrate itself on her husband and Miss Brent: Amherst had never
shown any inclination for the society of other women, and if the
possibility had been suggested to her, she would probably have said that
Justine was not "in his style"--so unconscious is a pretty woman apt to
be of the versatility of masculine tastes. But Amherst saw that she felt
herself excluded from amusements in which she had no desire to join, and
of which she consequently failed to see the purpose; and he gave up
accompanying his stepdaughter.
Bessy, as if in acknowledgment of his renunciation, rose earlier in
order to prolong their rides together. Dr. Wyant had counselled her
against the fatigue of following the hounds, and she instinctively
turned their horses away from the course the hunt was likely to take;
but now and then the cry of the pack, or the flash of red on a distant
slope, sent the blood to her face and made her press her mare to a
gallop. When they escaped such encounters she showed no great zest in
the exercise, and their rides resolved themselves into a spiritless
middle-aged jog along the autumn lanes. In the early days of their
marriage the joy of a canter side by side had merged them in a community
of sensation beyond need of speech; but now that the physical spell had
passed they felt the burden of a silence that neither knew how to break.
Once only, a moment's friction galvanized these lifeless rides. It was
one morning when Bessy's wild mare Impulse, under-exercised and
over-fed, suddenly broke from her control, and would have unseated her
but for Amherst's grasp on the bridle.
"The horse is not fit for you to ride," he exclaimed, as the hot
creature, with shudders of defiance rippling her flanks, lapsed into
sullen subjection.
"It's only because I don't ride her enough," Bessy panted. "That new
groom is ruining her mouth."
"You must not ride her alone, then."
"I shall not let that man ride her."
"I say you must not ride her alone."
"It's ridiculous to have a groom at one's heels!"
"Nevertheless you must, if you ride Impulse."
Their eyes met, and she quivered and yielded like the horse. "Oh, if you
say so--" She always hugged his brief flashes of authority.
"I do say so. You promise me?"
"If you like----"
* * * * *
Amherst had made an attempt to occupy himself with the condition of
Lynbrook, one of those slovenly villages, without individual character
or the tradition of self-respect, which spring up in America on the
skirts of the rich summer colonies. But Bessy had never given Lynbrook a
thought, and he realized the futility of hoping to interest her in its
mongrel population of day-labourers and publicans so soon after his
glaring failure at Westmore. The sight of the village irritated him
whenever he passed through the Lynbrook gates, but having perforce
accepted the situation of prince consort, without voice in the
government, he tried to put himself out of relation with all the
questions which had hitherto engrossed him, and to see life simply as a
spectator. He could even conceive that, under certain conditions, there
might be compensations in the passive attitude; but unfortunately these
conditions were not such as the life at Lynbrook presented.
The temporary cessation of Bessy's week-end parties had naturally not
closed her doors to occasional visitors, and glimpses of the autumnal
animation of Long Island passed now and then across the Amhersts'
horizon. Blanche Carbury had installed herself at Mapleside, a
fashionable colony half-way between Lynbrook and Clifton, and even
Amherst, unused as he was to noting the seemingly inconsecutive
movements of idle people, could not but remark that her visits to his
wife almost invariably coincided with Ned Bowfort's cantering over
unannounced from the Hunt Club, where he had taken up his autumn
quarters.
There was something very likeable about Bowfort, to whom Amherst was
attracted by the fact that he was one of the few men of Bessy's circle
who knew what was going on in the outer world. Throughout an existence
which one divined to have been both dependent and desultory, he had
preserved a sense of wider relations and acquired a smattering of
information to which he applied his only independent faculty, that of
clear thought. He could talk intelligently and not too inaccurately of
the larger questions which Lynbrook ignored, and a gay indifference to
the importance of money seemed the crowning grace of his nature, till
Amherst suddenly learned that this attitude of detachment was generally
ascribed to the liberality of Mrs. Fenton Carbury. "Everybody knows she
married Fenton to provide for Ned," some one let fall in the course of
one of the smoking-room dissertations on which the host of Lynbrook had
such difficulty in fixing his attention; and the speaker's
matter-of-course tone, and the careless acquiescence of his hearers,
were more offensive to Amherst than the fact itself. In the first flush
of his disgust he classed the story as one of the lies bred in the
malarious air of after-dinner gossip; but gradually he saw that, whether
true or not, it had sufficient circulation to cast a shade of ambiguity
on the persons concerned. Bessy alone seemed deaf to the rumours about
her friend. There was something captivating to her in Mrs. Carbury's
slang and noise, in her defiance of decorum and contempt of criticism.
"I like Blanche because she doesn't pretend," was Bessy's vague
justification of the lady; but in reality she was under the mysterious
spell which such natures cast over the less venturesome imaginations of
their own sex.
Amherst at first tried to deaden himself to the situation, as part of
the larger coil of miseries in which he found himself; but all his
traditions were against such tolerance, and they were roused to revolt
by the receipt of a newspaper clipping, sent by an anonymous hand,
enlarging on the fact that the clandestine meetings of a fashionable
couple were being facilitated by the connivance of a Long Island
_chatelaine_. Amherst, hot from the perusal of this paragraph, sprang
into the first train, and laid the clipping before his father-in-law,
who chanced to be passing through town on his way from the Hudson to the
Hot Springs.
Mr. Langhope, ensconced in the cushioned privacy of the reading-room at
the Amsterdam Club, where he had invited his son-in-law to meet him,
perused the article with the cool eye of the collector to whom a new
curiosity is offered.
"I suppose," he mused, "that in the time of the Pharaohs the Morning
Papyrus used to serve up this kind of thing"--and then, as the nervous
tension of his hearer expressed itself in an abrupt movement, he added,
handing back the clipping with a smile: "What do you propose to do? Kill
the editor, and forbid Blanche and Bowfort the house?"
"I mean to do something," Amherst began, suddenly chilled by the
realization that his wrath had not yet shaped itself into a definite
plan of action.
"Well, it must be that or nothing," said Mr. Langhope, drawing his stick
meditatively across his knee. "And, of course, if it's _that_, you'll
land Bessy in a devil of a mess."
Without giving his son-in-law time to protest, he touched rapidly but
vividly on the inutility and embarrassment of libel suits, and on the
devices whereby the legal means of vindication from such attacks may be
turned against those who have recourse to them; and Amherst listened
with a sickened sense of the incompatibility between abstract standards
of honour and their practical application.
"What should you do, then?" he murmured, as Mr. Langhope ended with his
light shrug and a "See Tredegar, if you don't believe me"--; and his
father-in-law replied with an evasive gesture: "Why, leave the
responsibility where it belongs!"
"Where it belongs?"
"To Fenton Carbury, of course. Luckily it's nobody's business but his,
and if he doesn't mind what is said about his wife I don't see how you
can take up the cudgels for her without casting another shade on her
somewhat chequered reputation."
Amherst stared. "His wife? What do I care what's said of her? I'm
thinking of mine!"
"Well, if Carbury has no objection to his wife's meeting Bowfort, I
don't see how you can object to her meeting him at your house. In such
matters, as you know, it has mercifully been decided that the husband's
attitude shall determine other people's; otherwise we should be deprived
of the legitimate pleasure of slandering our neighbours." Mr. Langhope
was always careful to temper his explanations with an "as you know": he
would have thought it ill-bred to omit this parenthesis in elucidating
the social code to his son-in-law.
"Then you mean that I can do nothing?" Amherst exclaimed.
Mr. Langhope smiled. "What applies to Carbury applies to you--by doing
nothing you establish the fact that there's nothing to do; just as you
create the difficulty by recognizing it." And he added, as Amherst sat
silent: "Take Bessy away, and they'll have to see each other elsewhere."
* * * * *
Amherst returned to Lynbrook with the echoes of this casuistry in his
brain. It seemed to him but a part of the ingenious system of evasion
whereby a society bent on the undisturbed pursuit of amusement had
contrived to protect itself from the intrusion of the disagreeable: a
policy summed up in Mr. Langhope's concluding advice that Amherst should
take his wife away. Yes--that was wealth's contemptuous answer to every
challenge of responsibility: duty, sorrow and disgrace were equally to
be evaded by a change of residence, and nothing in life need be faced
and fought out while one could pay for a passage to Europe!
In a calmer mood Amherst's sense of humour would have preserved him from
such a view of his father-in-law's advice; but just then it fell like a
spark on his smouldering prejudices. He was clear-sighted enough to
recognize the obstacles to legal retaliation; but this only made him the
more resolved to assert his will in his own house. He no longer paused
to consider the possible effect of such a course on his already strained
relations with his wife: the man's will rose in him and spoke.
The scene between Bessy and himself was short and sharp; and it ended in
a way that left him more than ever perplexed at the ways of her sex.
Impatient of preamble, he had opened the attack with his ultimatum: the
suspected couple were to be denied the house. Bessy flamed into
immediate defence of her friend; but to Amherst's surprise she no
longer sounded the note of her own rights. Husband and wife were
animated by emotions deeper-seated and more instinctive than had ever
before confronted them; yet while Amherst's resistance was gathering
strength from the conflict, Bessy unexpectedly collapsed in tears and
submission. She would do as he wished, of course--give up seeing
Blanche, dismiss Bowfort, wash her hands, in short, of the imprudent
pair--in such matters a woman needed a man's guidance, a wife must of
necessity see with her husband's eyes; and she looked up into his
through a mist of penitence and admiration....
XXI
IN the first reaction from her brief delusion about Stephen Wyant,
Justine accepted with a good grace the necessity of staying on at
Lynbrook. Though she was now well enough to return to her regular work,
her talk with Amherst had made her feel that, for the present, she could
be of more use by remaining with Bessy; and she was not sorry to have a
farther period of delay and reflection before taking the next step in
her life. These at least were the reasons she gave herself for deciding
not to leave; and if any less ostensible lurked beneath, they were not
as yet visible even to her searching self-scrutiny.
At first she was embarrassed by the obligation of meeting Dr. Wyant, on
whom her definite refusal had produced an effect for which she could not
hold herself blameless. She had not kept her promise of seeing him on
the day after their encounter at the post-office, but had written,
instead, in terms which obviously made such a meeting unnecessary. But
all her efforts to soften the abruptness of her answer could not
conceal, from either herself or her suitor, that it was not the one she
had led him to expect; and she foresaw that if she remained at Lynbrook
she could not escape a scene of recrimination.
When the scene took place, Wyant's part in it went far toward justifying
her decision; yet his vehement reproaches contained a sufficient core of
truth to humble her pride. It was lucky for her somewhat exaggerated
sense of fairness that he overshot the mark by charging her with a
coquetry of which she knew herself innocent, and laying on her the
responsibility for any follies to which her rejection might drive him.
Such threats, as a rule, no longer move the feminine imagination; yet
Justine's pity for all forms of weakness made her recognize, in the very
heat of her contempt for Wyant, that his reproaches were not the mere
cry of wounded vanity but the appeal of a nature conscious of its lack
of recuperative power. It seemed to her as though she had done him
irreparable harm, and the feeling might have betrayed her into too
great a show of compassion had she not been restrained by a salutary
fear of the result.
The state of Bessy's nerves necessitated frequent visits from her
physician, but Justine, on these occasions, could usually shelter
herself behind the professional reserve which kept even Wyant from any
open expression of feeling. One day, however, they chanced to find
themselves alone before Bessy's return from her ride. The servant had
ushered Wyant into the library where Justine was writing, and when she
had replied to his enquiries about his patient they found themselves
face to face with an awkward period of waiting. Justine was too proud to
cut it short by leaving the room; but Wyant answered her commonplaces at
random, stirring uneasily to and fro between window and fireside, and at
length halting behind the table at which she sat.
"May I ask how much longer you mean to stay here?" he said in a low
voice, his eyes darkening under the sullen jut of the brows.
As she glanced up in surprise she noticed for the first time an odd
contraction of his pupils, and the discovery, familiar enough in her
professional experience, made her disregard the abruptness of his
question and softened the tone in which she answered. "I hardly know--I
suppose as long as I am needed."
Wyant laughed. "Needed by whom? By John Amherst?"
A moment passed before Justine took in the full significance of the
retort; then the blood rushed to her face. "Yes--I believe both Mr. and
Mrs. Amherst need me," she answered, keeping her eyes on his; and Wyant
laughed again.
"You didn't think so till Amherst came back from Hanaford. His return
seems to have changed your plans in several respects."
She looked away from him, for even now his eyes moved her to pity and
self-reproach. "Dr. Wyant, you are not well; why do you wait to see Mrs.
Amherst?" she said.
He stared at her and then his glance fell. "I'm much obliged--I'm as
well as usual," he muttered, pushing the hair from his forehead with a
shaking hand; and at that moment the sound of Bessy's voice gave Justine
a pretext for escape.
In her own room she sank for a moment under a rush of self-disgust; but
it soon receded before the saner forces of her nature, leaving only a
residue of pity for the poor creature whose secret she had surprised.
She had never before suspected Wyant of taking a drug, nor did she now
suppose that he did so habitually; but to see him even momentarily under
such an influence explained her instinctive sense of his weakness. She
felt now that what would have been an insult on other lips was only a
cry of distress from his; and once more she blamed herself and forgave
him.
But if she had been inclined to any morbidness of self-reproach she
would have been saved from it by other cares. For the moment she was
more concerned with Bessy's fate than with her own--her poor friend
seemed to have so much more at stake, and so much less strength to bring
to the defence of her happiness. Justine was always saved from any
excess of self-compassion by the sense, within herself, of abounding
forces of growth and self-renewal, as though from every lopped
aspiration a fresh shoot of energy must spring; but she felt that Bessy
had no such sources of renovation, and that every disappointment left an
arid spot in her soul.
Even without her friend's confidences, Justine would have had no
difficulty in following the successive stages of the Amhersts' inner
history. She knew that Amherst had virtually resigned his rule at
Westmore, and that his wife, in return for the sacrifice, was trying to
conform to the way of life she thought he preferred; and the futility of
both attempts was more visible to Justine than to either of the two
concerned. She saw that the failure of the Amhersts' marriage lay not in
any accident of outward circumstances but in the lack of all natural
points of contact. As she put it to herself, they met neither underfoot
nor overhead: practical necessities united them no more than imaginative
joys.
There were moments when Justine thought Amherst hard to Bessy, as she
suspected that he had once been hard to his mother--as the leader of men
must perhaps always be hard to the hampering sex. Yet she did justice to
his efforts to accept the irretrievable, and to waken in his wife some
capacity for sharing in his minor interests, since she had none of her
own with which to fill their days.
Amherst had always been a reader; not, like Justine herself, a
flame-like devourer of the page, but a slow absorber of its essence; and
in the early days of his marriage he had fancied it would be easy to
make Bessy share this taste. Though his mother was not a bookish woman,
he had breathed at her side an air rich in allusion and filled with the
bright presences of romance; and he had always regarded this commerce of
the imagination as one of the normal conditions of life. The discovery
that there were no books at Lynbrook save a few morocco "sets"
imprisoned behind the brass trellisings of the library had been one of
the many surprises of his new state. But in his first months with Bessy
there was no room for books, and if he thought of the matter it was only
in a glancing vision of future evenings, when he and she, in the calm
afterglow of happiness, should lean together over some cherished page.
Her lack of response to any reference outside the small circle of daily
facts had long since dispelled that vision; but now that his own mind
felt the need of inner sustenance he began to ask himself whether he
might not have done more to rouse her imagination. During the long
evenings over the library fire he tried to lead the talk to books, with
a parenthesis, now and again, from the page beneath his eye; and Bessy
met the experiment with conciliatory eagerness. She showed, in especial,
a hopeful but misleading preference for poetry, leaning back with
dreaming lids and lovely parted lips while he rolled out the immortal
measures; but her outward signs of attention never ripened into any
expression of opinion, or any after-allusion to what she heard, and
before long he discovered that Justine Brent was his only listener. It
was to her that the words he read began to be unconsciously addressed;
her comments directed him in his choice of subjects, and the ensuing
discussions restored him to some semblance of mental activity.
Bessy, true to her new role of acquiescence, shone silently on this
interchange of ideas; Amherst even detected in her a vague admiration
for his power of conversing on subjects which she regarded as abstruse;
and this childlike approval, combined with her submission to his will,
deluded him with a sense of recovered power over her. He could not but
note that the new phase in their relations had coincided with his first
assertion of mastery; and he rashly concluded that, with the removal of
the influences tending to separate them, his wife might gradually be won
back to her earlier sympathy with his views.
To accept this theory was to apply it; for nothing could long divert
Amherst from his main purpose, and all the thwarted strength of his will
was only gathering to itself fresh stores of energy. He had never been a
skilful lover, for no woman had as yet stirred in him those feelings
which call the finer perceptions into play; and there was no instinct to
tell him that Bessy's sudden conformity to his wishes was as unreasoning
as her surrender to his first kiss. He fancied that he and she were at
length reaching some semblance of that moral harmony which should grow
out of the physical accord, and that, poor and incomplete as the
understanding was, it must lift and strengthen their relation.
He waited till early winter had brought solitude to Lynbrook, dispersing
the hunting colony to various points of the compass, and sending Mr.
Langhope to Egypt and the Riviera, while Mrs. Ansell, as usual, took up
her annual tour of a social circuit whose extreme points were marked by
Boston and Baltimore--and then he made his final appeal to his wife.
His pretext for speaking was a letter from Duplain, definitely
announcing his resolve not to remain at Westmore. A year earlier
Amherst, deeply moved by the letter, would have given it to his wife in
the hope of its producing the same effect on her. He knew better now--he
had learned her instinct for detecting "business" under every serious
call on her attention. His only hope, as always, was to reach her
through the personal appeal; and he put before her the fact of Duplain's
withdrawal as the open victory of his antagonists. But he saw at once
that even this could not infuse new life into the question.
"If I go back he'll stay--I can hold him, can gain time till things take
a turn," he urged.
"Another? I thought they were definitely settled," she objected
languidly.
"No--they're not; they can't be, on such a basis," Amherst broke out
with sudden emphasis. He walked across the room, and came back to her
side with a determined face. "It's a delusion, a deception," he
exclaimed, "to think I can stand by any longer and see things going to
ruin at Westmore! If I've made you think so, I've unconsciously deceived
us both. As long as you're my wife we've only one honour between us, and
that honour is mine to take care of."
"Honour? What an odd expression!" she said with a forced laugh, and a
little tinge of pink in her cheek. "You speak as if I had--had made
myself talked about --when you know I've never even looked at another
man!"
"Another man?" Amherst looked at her in wonder. "Good God! Can't you
conceive of any vow to be kept between husband and wife but the
primitive one of bodily fidelity? Heaven knows I've never looked at
another woman--but, by my reading of our compact, I shouldn't be keeping
faith with you if I didn't help you to keep faith with better things.
And you owe me the same help--the same chance to rise through you, and
not sink by you--else we've betrayed each other more deeply than any
adultery could make us!"
She had drawn back, turning pale again, and shrinking a little at the
sound of words which, except when heard in church, she vaguely
associated with oaths, slammed doors, and other evidences of
ill-breeding; but Amherst had been swept too far on the flood of his
indignation to be checked by such small signs of disapproval.
"You'll say that what I'm asking you is to give me back the free use of
your money. Well! Why not? Is it so much for a wife to give? I know you
all think that a man who marries a rich woman forfeits his self-respect
if he spends a penny without her approval. But that's because money is
so sacred to you all! It seems to me the least important thing that a
woman entrusts to her husband. What of her dreams and her hopes, her
belief in justice and goodness and decency? If he takes those and
destroys them, he'd better have had a mill-stone about his neck. But
nobody has a word to say till he touches her dividends--then he's a
calculating brute who has married her for her fortune!"
He had come close again, facing her with outstretched hands,
half-commanding, half in appeal. "Don't you see that I can't go on in
this way--that I've _no right_ to let you keep me from Westmore?"
Bessy was looking at him coldly, under the half-dropped lids of
indifference. "I hardly know what you mean--you use such peculiar words;
but I don't see why you should expect me to give up all the ideas I was
brought up in. Our standards _are_ different--but why should yours
always be right?"
"You believed they were right when you married me--have they changed
since then?"
"No; but----" Her face seemed to harden and contract into a small
expressionless mask, in which he could no longer read anything but blank
opposition to his will.
"You trusted my judgment not long ago," he went on, "when I asked you to
give up seeing Mrs. Carbury----"
She flushed, but with anger, not compunction. "It seems to me that
should be a reason for your not asking me to make other sacrifices! When
I gave up Blanche I thought you would see that I wanted to please
you--and that you would do something for me in return...."
Amherst interrupted her with a laugh. "Thank you for telling me your
real reasons. I was fool enough to think you acted from conviction--not
that you were simply striking a bargain----"
He broke off, and they looked at each other with a kind of fear, each
hearing between them the echo of irreparable words. Amherst's only clear
feeling was that he must not speak again till he had beaten down the
horrible sensation in his breast--the rage of hate which had him in its
grip, and which made him almost afraid, while it lasted, to let his eyes
rest on the fair weak creature before him. Bessy, too, was in the clutch
of a mute anger which slowly poured its benumbing current around her
heart. Strong waves of passion did not quicken her vitality: she grew
inert and cold under their shock. Only one little pulse of self-pity
continued to beat in her, trembling out at last on the cry: "Ah, I know
it's not because you care so much for Westmore--it's only because you
want to get away from me!"
Amherst stared as if her words had flashed a light into the darkest
windings of his misery. "Yes--I want to get away..." he said; and he
turned and walked out of the room.
He went down to the smoking-room, and ringing for a servant, ordered
his horse to be saddled. The foot-man who answered his summons brought
the afternoon's mail, and Amherst, throwing himself down on the sofa,
began to tear open his letters while he waited.
He ran through the first few without knowing what he read; but presently
his attention was arrested by the hand-writing of a man he had known well
in college, and who had lately come into possession of a large cotton-mill
in the South. He wrote now to ask if Amherst could recommend a good
manager--"not one of your old routine men, but a young fellow with the new
ideas. Things have been in pretty bad shape down here," the writer added,
"and now that I'm in possession I want to see what can be done to civilize
the place"; and he went on to urge that Amherst should come down himself
to inspect the mills, and propose such improvements as his experience
suggested. "We've all heard of the great things you're doing at Westmore,"
the letter ended; and Amherst cast it from him with a groan....
It was Duplain's chance, of course...that was his first thought. He took
up the letter and read it over. He knew the man who wrote--no
sentimentalist seeking emotional variety from vague philanthropic
experiments, but a serious student of social conditions, now
unexpectedly provided with the opportunity to apply his ideas. Yes, it
was Duplain's chance--if indeed it might not be his own!... Amherst sat
upright, dazzled by the thought. Why Duplain--why not himself? Bessy had
spoken the illuminating word--what he wanted was to get away--to get
away at any cost! Escape had become his one thought: escape from the
bondage of Lynbrook, from the bitter memory of his failure at Westmore;
and here was the chance to escape back into life--into independence,
activity and usefulness! Every atrophied faculty in him suddenly started
from its torpor, and his brain throbbed with the pain of the
awakening.... The servant came to tell him that his horse waited, and he
sprang up, took his riding-whip from the rack, stared a moment,
absently, after the man's retreating back, and then dropped down again
on the sofa....
What was there to keep him from accepting? His wife's affection was
dead--if her sentimental fancy for him had ever deserved the name! And
his passing mastery over her was gone too--he smiled to remember that,
hardly two hours earlier, he had been fatuous enough to think he could
still regain it! Now he said to himself that she would sooner desert a
friend to please him than sacrifice a fraction of her income; and the
discovery cast a stain of sordidness on their whole relation. He could
still imagine struggling to win her back from another man, or even to
save her from some folly into which mistaken judgment or perverted
enthusiasm might have hurried her; but to go on battling against the
dull unimaginative subservience to personal luxury--the slavery to
houses and servants and clothes--ah, no, while he had any fight left in
him it was worth spending in a better cause than that!
Through the open window he could hear, in the mild December stillness,
his horse's feet coming and going on the gravel. _Her_ horse, led up and
down by _her_ servant, at the door of _her_ house!... The sound
symbolized his whole future...the situation his marriage had made for
him, and to which he must henceforth bend, unless he broke with it then
and there.... He tried to look ahead, to follow up, one by one, the
consequences of such a break. That it would be final he had no doubt.
There are natures which seem to be drawn closer by dissension, to
depend, for the renewal of understanding, on the spark of generosity and
compunction that anger strikes out of both; but Amherst knew that
between himself and his wife no such clearing of the moral atmosphere
was possible. The indignation which left him with tingling nerves and a
burning need of some immediate escape into action, crystallized in Bessy
into a hard kernel of obstinacy, into which, after each fresh collision,
he felt that a little more of herself had been absorbed.... No, the
break between them would be final--if he went now he would not come
back. And it flashed across him that this solution might have been
foreseen by his wife--might even have been deliberately planned and led
up to by those about her. His father-in-law had never liked him--the
disturbing waves of his activity had rippled even the sheltered surface
of Mr. Langhope's existence. He must have been horribly in their way!
Well--it was not too late to take himself out of it. In Bessy's circle
the severing of such ties was regarded as an expensive but unhazardous
piece of surgery--nobody bled to death of the wound.... The footman came
back to remind him that his horse was waiting, and Amherst rose to his
feet.
"Send him back to the stable," he said with a glance at his watch, "and
order a trap to take me to the next train."
XXII
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.
XXIII
JUSTINE was coming back to Lynbrook. She had been, after all, unable to
stay out the ten days of her visit: the undefinable sense of being
needed, so often the determining motive of her actions, drew her back to
Long Island at the end of the week. She had received no word from
Amherst or Bessy; only Cicely had told her, in a big round hand, that
mother had been away three days, and that it had been very lonely, and
that the housekeeper's cat had kittens, and she was to have one; and
were kittens christened, or how did they get their names?--because she
wanted to call hers Justine; and she had found in her book a bird like
the one father had shown them in the swamp; and they were not alone now,
because the Telfers were there, and they had all been out sleighing;
but it would be much nicer when Justine came back....
It was as difficult to extract any sequence of facts from Cicely's
letter as from an early chronicle. She made no reference to Amherst's
return, which was odd, since she was fond of her step-father, yet not
significant, since the fact of his arrival might have been crowded out
by the birth of the kittens, or some incident equally prominent in her
perspectiveless grouping of events; nor did she name the date of her
mother's departure, so that Justine could not guess whether it had been
contingent on Amherst's return, or wholly unconnected with it. What
puzzled her most was Bessy's own silence--yet that too, in a sense, was
reassuring, for Bessy thought of others chiefly when it was painful to
think of herself, and her not writing implied that she had felt no
present need of her friend's sympathy.
Justine did not expect to find Amherst at Lynbrook. She had felt
convinced, when they parted, that he would persist in his plan of going
south; and the fact that the Telfer girls were again in possession made
it seem probable that he had already left. Under the circumstances,
Justine thought the separation advisable; but she was eager to be
assured that it had been effected amicably, and without open affront to
Bessy's pride.
She arrived on a Saturday afternoon, and when she entered the house the
sound of voices from the drawing-room, and the prevailing sense of
bustle and movement amid which her own coming was evidently an
unconsidered detail, showed that the normal life of Lynbrook had resumed
its course. The Telfers, as usual, had brought a lively throng in their
train; and amid the bursts of merriment about the drawing-room tea-table
she caught Westy Gaines's impressive accents, and the screaming laughter
of Blanche Carbury....
So Blanche Carbury was back at Lynbrook! The discovery gave Justine
fresh cause for conjecture. Whatever reciprocal concessions might have
resulted from Amherst's return to his wife, it seemed hardly probable
that they included a renewal of relations with Mrs. Carbury. Had his
mission failed then--had he and Bessy parted in anger, and was Mrs.
Carbury's presence at Lynbrook Bessy's retort to his assertion of
independence?
In the school-room, where Justine was received with the eager outpouring
of Cicely's minutest experiences, she dared not put the question that
would have solved these doubts; and she left to dress for dinner without
knowing whether Amherst had returned to Lynbrook. Yet in her heart she
never questioned that he had done so; all her fears revolved about what
had since taken place.
She saw Bessy first in the drawing-room, surrounded by her guests; and
their brief embrace told her nothing, except that she had never beheld
her friend more brilliant, more triumphantly in possession of recovered
spirits and health.
That Amherst was absent was now made evident by Bessy's requesting Westy
Gaines to lead the way to the dining-room with Mrs. Ansell, who was one
of the reassembled visitors; and the only one, as Justine presently
observed, not in key with the prevailing gaiety. Mrs. Ansell, usually so
tinged with the colours of her environment, preserved on this occasion a
grey neutrality of tone which was the only break in the general
brightness. It was not in her graceful person to express anything as
gross as disapproval, yet that sentiment was manifest, to the nice
observer, in a delicate aloofness which made the waves of laughter fall
back from her, and spread a circle of cloudy calm about her end of the
table. Justine had never been greatly drawn to Mrs. Ansell. Her own
adaptability was not in the least akin to the older woman's studied
self-effacement; and the independence of judgment which Justine
preserved in spite of her perception of divergent standpoints made her a
little contemptuous of an excess of charity that seemed to have been
acquired at the cost of all individual convictions. To-night for the
first time she felt in Mrs. Ansell a secret sympathy with her own
fears; and a sense of this tacit understanding made her examine with
sudden interest the face of her unexpected ally.... After all, what did
she know of Mrs. Ansell's history--of the hidden processes which had
gradually subdued her own passions and desires, making of her, as it
were, a mere decorative background, a connecting link between other
personalities? Perhaps, for a woman alone in the world, without the
power and opportunity that money gives, there was no alternative between
letting one's individuality harden into a small dry nucleus of egoism,
or diffuse itself thus in the interstices of other lives--and there fell
upon Justine the chill thought that just such a future might await her
if she missed the liberating gift of personal happiness....
* * * * *
Neither that night nor the next day had she a private word with
Bessy--and it became evident, as the hours passed, that Mrs. Amherst was
deliberately postponing the moment when they should find themselves
alone. But the Lynbrook party was to disperse on the Monday; and Bessy,
who hated early rising, and all the details of housekeeping, tapped at
Justine's door late on Sunday night to ask her to speed the departing
visitors.
She pleaded this necessity as an excuse for her intrusion, and the
playful haste of her manner showed a nervous shrinking from any renewal
of confidence; but as she leaned in the doorway, fingering the diamond
chain about her neck, while one satin-tipped foot emerged restlessly
from the edge of her lace gown, her face lost the bloom of animation
which talk and laughter always produced in it, and she looked so pale
and weary that Justine needed no better pretext for drawing her into the
room.
It was not in Bessy to resist a soothing touch in her moments of nervous
reaction. She sank into the chair by the fire and let her head rest
wearily against the cushion which Justine slipped behind it.
Justine dropped into the low seat beside her, and laid a hand on hers.
"You don't look as well as when I went away, Bessy. Are you sure you've
done wisely in beginning your house-parties so soon?"
It always alarmed Bessy to be told that she was not looking her best,
and she sat upright, a wave of pink rising under her sensitive skin.
"I am quite well, on the contrary; but I was dying of inanition in this
big empty house, and I suppose I haven't got the boredom out of my
system yet!"
Justine recognized the echo of Mrs. Carbury's manner.
"Even if you _were_ bored," she rejoined, "the inanition was probably
good for you. What does Dr. Wyant say to your breaking away from his
regime?" She named Wyant purposely, knowing that Bessy had that respect
for the medical verdict which is the last trace of reverence for
authority in the mind of the modern woman. But Mrs. Amherst laughed with
gentle malice.
"Oh, I haven't seen Dr. Wyant lately. His interest in me died out the
day you left."
Justine forced a laugh to hide her annoyance. She had not yet recovered
from the shrinking disgust of her last scene with Wyant.
"Don't be a goose, Bessy. If he hasn't come, it must be because you've
told him not to--because you're afraid of letting him see that you're
disobeying him."
Bessy laughed again. "My dear, I'm afraid of nothing--nothing! Not even
of your big eyes when they glare at me like coals. I suppose you must
have looked at poor Wyant like that to frighten him away! And yet the
last time we talked of him you seemed to like him--you even hinted that
it was because of him that Westy had no chance."
Justine uttered an impatient exclamation. "If neither of them existed it
wouldn't affect the other's chances in the least. Their only merit is
that they both enhance the charms of celibacy!"
Bessy's smile dropped, and she turned a grave glance on her friend. "Ah,
most men do that--you're so clever to have found it out!"
It was Justine's turn to smile. "Oh, but I haven't--as a
generalization. I mean to marry as soon as I get the chance!"
"The chance----?"
"To meet the right man. I'm gambler enough to believe in my luck yet!"
Mrs. Amherst sighed compassionately. "There _is_ no right man! As
Blanche says, matrimony's as uncomfortable as a ready-made shoe. How can
one and the same institution fit every individual case? And why should
we all have to go lame because marriage was once invented to suit an
imaginary case?"
Justine gave a slight shrug. "You talk of walking lame--how else do we
all walk? It seems to me that life's the tight boot, and marriage the
crutch that may help one to hobble along!" She drew Bessy's hand into
hers with a caressing pressure. "When you philosophize I always know
you're tired. No one who feels well stops to generalize about symptoms.
If you won't let your doctor prescribe for you, your nurse is going to
carry out his orders. What you want is quiet. Be reasonable and send
away everybody before Mr. Amherst comes back!"
She dropped the last phrase carelessly, glancing away as she spoke; but
the stiffening of the fingers in her clasp sent a little tremor through
her hand.
"Thanks for your advice. It would be excellent but for one thing--my
husband is not coming back!"
The mockery in Bessy's voice seemed to pass into her features, hardening
and contracting them as frost shrivels a flower. Justine's face, on the
contrary, was suddenly illuminated by compassion, as though a light had
struck up into it from the cold glitter of her friend's unhappiness.
"Bessy! What do you mean by not coming back?"
"I mean he's had the tact to see that we shall be more comfortable
apart--without putting me to the unpleasant necessity of telling him
so."
Again the piteous echo of Blanche Carbury's phrases! The laboured
mimicry of her ideas!
Justine looked anxiously at her friend. It seemed horribly false not to
mention her own talk with Amherst, yet she felt it wiser to feign
ignorance, since Bessy could never be trusted to interpret rightly any
departure from the conventional.
"Please tell me what has happened," she said at length.
Bessy, with a smile, released her hand. "John has gone back to the life
he prefers--which I take to be a hint to me to do the same."
Justine hesitated again; then the pressure of truth overcame every
barrier of expediency. "Bessy--I ought to tell you that I saw Mr.
Amherst in town the day I went to Philadelphia. He spoke of going away
for a time...he seemed unhappy...but he told me he was coming back to
see you first--" She broke off, her clear eyes on her friend's; and she
saw at once that Bessy was too self-engrossed to feel any surprise at
her avowal. "Surely he came back?" she went on.
"Oh, yes--he came back!" Bessy sank into the cushions, watching the
firelight play on her diamond chain as she repeated the restless gesture
of lifting it up and letting it slip through her fingers.
"Well--and then?"
"Then--nothing! I was not here when he came."
"You were not here? What had happened?"
"I had gone over to Blanche Carbury's for a day or two. I was just
leaving when I heard he was coming back, and I couldn't throw her over
at the last moment."
Justine tried to catch the glance that fluttered evasively under Bessy's
lashes. "You knew he was coming--and you chose that time to go to Mrs.
Carbury's?"
"I didn't choose, my dear--it just happened! And it really happened for
the best. I suppose he was annoyed at my going--you know he has a
ridiculous prejudice against Blanche--and so the next morning he rushed
off to his cotton mill."
There was a pause, while the diamonds continued to flow in threads of
fire through Mrs. Amherst's fingers.
At length Justine said: "Did Mr. Amherst know that you knew he was
coming back before you left for Mrs. Carbury's?"
Bessy feigned to meditate the question. "Did he know that I knew that he
knew?" she mocked. "Yes--I suppose so--he must have known." She stifled
a slight yawn as she drew herself languidly to her feet.
"Then he took that as your answer?"
"My answer----?"
"To his coming back----"
"So it appears. I told you he had shown unusual tact." Bessy stretched
her softly tapering arms above her head and then dropped them along her
sides with another yawn. "But it's almost morning--it's wicked of me to
have kept you so late, when you must be up to look after all those
people!"
She flung her arms with a light gesture about Justine's shoulders, and
laid a dry kiss on her cheek.
"Don't look at me with those big eyes--they've eaten up the whole of
your face! And you needn't think I'm sorry for what I've done," she
declared. "I'm _not_--the--least--little--atom--of a bit!"
XXIV
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 matinee.
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
role."
Justine controlled herself. "My only role, 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.