eyes fell on the clock. If Amherst had caught the two o'clock express he
would be at the house within the hour; and the only thing that seemed
of consequence now, was that he should not meet Wyant. Supposing she
still found courage to refuse--there was no knowing how long the
humiliating scene might be prolonged: and she must be rid of the
creature at any cost. After all, she seldom wore the sapphire--months
might pass without its absence being noted by Amherst's careless eye;
and if Wyant should pawn it, she might somehow save money to buy it back
before it was missed. She went through these calculations with feverish
rapidity; then she turned again to Wyant.
"You won't come back--ever?"
"I swear I won't," he said.
He moved away toward the window, as if to spare her; and she turned and
slowly left the room.
She never forgot the moments that followed. Once outside the door she
was in such haste that she stumbled on the stairs, and had to pause on
the landing to regain her breath. In her room she found one of the
housemaids busy, and at first could think of no pretext for dismissing
her. Then she bade the woman go down and send the brougham away, telling
the coachman to call for Miss Cicely at six.
Left alone, she bolted the door, and as if with a thief's hand, opened
her wardrobe, unlocked her jewel-box, and drew out the sapphire in its
flat morocco case. She restored the box to its place, the key to its
ring--then she opened the case and looked at the sapphire. As she did
so, a little tremor ran over her neck and throat, and closing her eyes
she felt her husband's kiss, and the touch of his hands as he fastened
on the jewel.
She unbolted the door, listened intently on the landing, and then went
slowly down the stairs. None of the servants were in sight, yet as she
reached the lower hall she was conscious that the air had grown suddenly
colder, as though the outer door had just been opened. She paused, and
listened again. There was a sound of talking in the drawing-room. Could
it be that in her absence a visitor had been admitted? The possibility
frightened her at first--then she welcomed it as an unexpected means of
ridding herself of her tormentor.
She opened the drawing-room door, and saw her husband talking with
Wyant.
XXXV
AMHERST, his back to the threshold, sat at a table writing: Wyant stood
a few feet away, staring down at the fire.
Neither had heard the door open; and before they were aware of her
entrance Justine had calculated that she must have been away for at
least five minutes, and that in that space of time almost anything
might have passed between them.
For a moment the power of connected thought left her; then her heart
gave a bound of relief. She said to herself that Wyant had doubtless
made some allusion to his situation, and that her husband, conscious
only of a great debt of gratitude, had at once sat down to draw a cheque
for him. The idea was so reassuring that it restored all her clearness
of thought.
Wyant was the first to see her. He made an abrupt movement, and Amherst,
rising, turned and put an envelope in his hand.
"There, my dear fellow----"
As he turned he caught sight of his wife.
"I caught the twelve o'clock train after all--you got my second wire?"
he asked.
"No," she faltered, pressing her left hand, with the little case in it,
close to the folds of her dress.
"I was afraid not. There was a bad storm at Hanaford, and they said
there might be a delay."
At the same moment she found Wyant advancing with extended hand, and
understood that he had concealed the fact of having already seen her.
She accepted the cue, and shook his hand, murmuring: "How do you do?"
Amherst looked at her, perhaps struck by her manner.
"You have not seen Dr. Wyant since Lynbrook?"
"No," she answered, thankful to have this pretext for her emotion.
"I have been telling him that he should not have left us so long without
news--especially as he has been ill, and things have gone rather badly
with him. But I hope we can help now. He has heard that Saint
Christopher's is looking for a house-physician for the paying patients'
wing, and as Mr. Langhope is away I have given him a line to Mrs.
Ansell."
"Extremely kind of you," Wyant murmured, passing his hand over his
forehead.
Justine stood silent. She wondered that her husband had not noticed that
tremulous degraded hand. But he was always so blind to externals--and he
had no medical experience to sharpen his perceptions.
Suddenly she felt impelled to speak "I am sorry Dr. Wyant has
been--unfortunate. Of course you will want to do everything to help him;
but would it not be better to wait till Mr. Langhope comes back?"
"Wyant thinks the delay might make him lose the place. It seems the
board meets tomorrow. And Mrs. Ansell really knows much more about it.
Isn't she the secretary of the ladies' committee?"
"I'm not sure--I believe so. But surely Mr. Langhope should be
consulted."
She felt Wyant's face change: his eyes settled on her in a threatening
stare.
Amherst looked at her also, and there was surprise in his glance. "I
think I can answer for my father-in-law. He feels as strongly as I do
how much we all owe to Dr. Wyant."
He seldom spoke of Mr. Langhope as his father-in-law, and the chance
designation seemed to mark a closer tie between them, to exclude Justine
from what was after all a family affair. For a moment she felt tempted
to accept the suggestion, and let the responsibility fall where it
would. But it would fall on Amherst--and that was intolerable.
"I think you ought to wait," she insisted.
An embarrassed silence settled on the three.
Wyant broke it by advancing toward Amherst. "I shall never forget your
kindness," he said; "and I hope to prove to Mrs. Amherst that it's not
misplaced."
The words were well chosen, and well spoken; Justine saw that they
produced a good effect. Amherst grasped the physician's hand with a
smile. "My dear fellow, I wish I could do more. Be sure to call on me
again if you want help."
"Oh, you've put me on my feet," said Wyant gratefully.
He bowed slightly to Justine and turned to go; but as he reached the
threshold she moved after him.
"Dr. Wyant--you must give back that letter."
He stopped short with a whitening face.
She felt Amherst's eyes on her again; and she said desperately,
addressing him: "Dr. Wyant understands my reasons."
Her husband's glance turned abruptly to Wyant. "Do you?" he asked after
a pause.
Wyant looked from one to the other. The moisture came out on his
forehead, and he passed his hand over it again. "Yes," he said in a dry
voice. "Mrs. Amherst wants me farther off--out of New York."
"Out of New York? What do you mean?"
Justine interposed hastily, before the answer could come. "It is because
Dr. Wyant is not in condition--for such a place--just at present."
"But he assures me he is quite well."
There was another silence; and again Wyant broke in, this time with a
slight laugh. "I can explain what Mrs. Amherst means; she intends to
accuse me of the morphine habit. And I can explain her reason for doing
so--she wants me out of the way."
Amherst turned on the speaker; and, as she had foreseen, his look was
terrible. "You haven't explained that yet," he said.
"Well--I can." Wyant waited another moment. "I know too much about her,"
he declared.
There was a low exclamation from Justine, and Amherst strode toward
Wyant. "You infernal blackguard!" he cried.
"Oh, gently----" Wyant muttered, flinching back from his outstretched
arm.
"My wife's wish is sufficient. Give me back that letter."
Wyant straightened himself. "No, by God, I won't!" he retorted
furiously. "I didn't ask you for it till you offered to help me; but I
won't let it be taken back without a word, like a thief that you'd
caught with your umbrella. If your wife won't explain I will. She's,
afraid I'll talk about what happened at Lynbrook."
Amherst's arm fell to his side. "At Lynbrook?"
Behind him there was a sound of inarticulate appeal--but he took no
notice.
"Yes. It's she who used morphia--but not on herself. She gives it to
other people. She gave an overdose to Mrs. Amherst."
Amherst looked at him confusedly. "An overdose?"
"Yes--purposely, I mean. And I came into the room at the wrong time. I
can prove that Mrs. Amherst died of morphia-poisoning."
"John!" Justine gasped out, pressing between them.
Amherst gently put aside the hand with which she had caught his arm.
"Wait a moment: this can't rest here. You can't want it to," he said to
her in an undertone.
"Why do you care...for what he says...when I don't?" she breathed back
with trembling lips.
"You can see I am not wanted here," Wyant threw in with a sneer.
Amherst remained silent for a brief space; then he turned his eyes once
more to his wife.
Justine lifted her face: it looked small and spent, like an extinguished
taper.
"It's true," she said.
"True?"
"I _did_ give...an overdose...intentionally, when I knew there was no
hope, and when the surgeons said she might go on suffering. She was very
strong...and I couldn't bear it...you couldn't have borne it...."
There was another silence; then she went on in a stronger voice, looking
straight at her husband: "And now will you send this man away?"
Amherst glanced at Wyant without moving. "Go," he said curtly.
Wyant, instead, moved a step nearer. "Just a minute, please. It's only
fair to hear my side. Your wife says there was no hope; yet the day
before she...gave the dose, Dr. Garford told her in my presence that
Mrs. Amherst might live."
Again Amherst's eyes addressed themselves slowly to Justine; and she
forced her lips to articulate an answer.
"Dr. Garford said...one could never tell...but I know he didn't believe
in the chance of recovery...no one did."
"Dr. Garford is dead," said Wyant grimly.
Amherst strode up to him again. "You scoundrel--leave the house!" he
commanded.
But still Wyant sneeringly stood his ground. "Not till I've finished. I
can't afford to let myself be kicked out like a dog because I happen to
be in the way. Every doctor knows that in cases of spinal lesion
recovery is becoming more and more frequent--if the patient survives the
third week there's every reason to hope. Those are the facts as they
would appear to any surgeon. If they're not true, why is Mrs. Amherst
afraid of having them stated? Why has she been paying me for nearly a
year to keep them quiet?"
"Oh----" Justine moaned.
"I never thought of talking till luck went against me. Then I asked her
for help--and reminded her of certain things. After that she kept me
supplied pretty regularly." He thrust his shaking hand into an inner
pocket. "Here are her envelopes...Quebec...Montreal...Saranac...I know
just where you went on your honeymoon. She had to write often, because
the sums were small. Why did she do it, if she wasn't afraid? And why
did she go upstairs just now to fetch me something? If you don't believe
me, ask her what she's got in her hand."
Amherst did not heed this injunction. He stood motionless, gripping the
back of a chair, as if his next gesture might be to lift and hurl it at
the speaker.
"Ask her----" Wyant repeated.
Amherst turned his head slowly, and his dull gaze rested on his wife.
His face looked years older--lips and eyes moved as heavily as an old
man's.
As he looked at her, Justine came forward without speaking, and laid the
little morocco case in his hand. He held it there a moment, as if hardly
understanding her action--then he tossed it on the table at his elbow,
and walked up to Wyant.
"You hound," he said--"now go!"
XXXVI
WHEN Wyant had left the room, and the house-door had closed on him,
Amherst spoke to his wife.
"Come upstairs," he said.
Justine followed him, scarcely conscious where she went, but moving
already with a lighter tread. Part of her weight of misery had been
lifted with Wyant's going. She had suffered less from the fear of what
her husband might think than from the shame of making her avowal in her
defamer's presence. And her faith in Amherst's comprehension had begun
to revive. He had dismissed Wyant with scorn and horror--did not that
show that he was on her side already? And how many more arguments she
had at her call! Her brain hummed with them as she followed him up the
stairs.
In her bedroom he closed the door and stood motionless, the same heavy
half-paralyzed look on his face. It frightened her and she went up to
him.
"John!" she said timidly.
He put his hand to his head. "Wait a moment----" he returned; and she
waited, her heart slowly sinking again.
The moment over, he seemed to recover his power of movement. He crossed
the room and threw himself into the armchair near the hearth.
"Now tell me everything."
He sat thrown back, his eyes fixed on the fire, and the vertical lines
between his brows forming a deep scar in his white face.
Justine moved nearer, and touched his arm beseechingly. "Won't you look
at me?"
He turned his head slowly, as if with an effort, and his eyes rested
reluctantly on hers.
"Oh, not like that!" she exclaimed.
He seemed to make a stronger effort at self-control. "Please don't heed
me--but say what there is to say," he said in a level voice, his gaze on
the fire.
She stood before him, her arms hanging down, her clasped fingers
twisting restlessly.
"I don't know that there is much to say--beyond what I've told you."
There was a slight sound in Amherst's throat, like the ghost of a
derisive laugh. After another interval he said: "I wish to hear exactly
what happened."
She seated herself on the edge of a chair near by, bending forward, with
hands interlocked and arms extended on her knees--every line reaching
out to him, as though her whole slight body were an arrow winged with
pleadings. It was a relief to speak at last, even face to face with the
stony image that sat in her husband's place; and she told her story,
detail by detail, omitting nothing, exaggerating nothing, speaking
slowly, clearly, with precision, aware that the bare facts were her
strongest argument.
Amherst, as he listened, shifted his position once, raising his hand so
that it screened his face; and in that attitude he remained when she had
ended.
As she waited for him to speak, Justine realized that her heart had been
alive with tremulous hopes. All through her narrative she had counted on
a murmur of perception, an exclamation of pity: she had felt sure of
melting the stony image. But Amherst said no word.
At length he spoke, still without turning his head. "You have not told
me why you kept this from me."
A sob formed in her throat, and she had to wait to steady her voice.
"No--that was my wrong--my weakness. When I did it I never thought of
being afraid to tell you--I had talked it over with you in my own
mind...so often...before...."
"Well?"
"Then--- when you came back it was harder...though I was still sure you
would approve me."
"Why harder?"
"Because at first--at Lynbrook--I _could not_ tell it all over, in
detail, as I have now...it was beyond human power...and without doing
so, I couldn't make it all clear to you...and so should only have added
to your pain. If you had been there you would have done as I did.... I
felt sure of that from the first. But coming afterward, you couldn't
judge...no one who was not there could judge...and I wanted to spare
you...."
"And afterward?"
She had shrunk in advance from this question, and she could not answer
it at once. To gain time she echoed it. "Afterward?"
"Did it never occur to you, when we met later--when you first went to
Mr. Langhope----"?
"To tell you then? No--because by that time I had come to see that I
could never be quite sure of making you understand. No one who was not
there at the time could know what it was to see her suffer."
"You thought it all over, then--decided definitely against telling me?"
"I did not have to think long. I felt I had done right--I still feel
so--and I was sure you would feel so, if you were in the same
circumstances."
There was another pause. Then Amherst said: "And last September--at
Hanaford?"
It was the word for which she had waited--the word of her inmost fears.
She felt the blood mount to her face.
"Did you see no difference--no special reason for telling me then?"
"Yes----" she faltered.
"Yet you said nothing."
"No."
Silence again. Her eyes strayed to the clock, and some dim association
of ideas told her that Cicely would soon be coming in.
"Why did you say nothing?"
He lowered his hand and turned toward her as he spoke; and she looked up
and faced him.
"Because I regarded the question as settled. I had decided it in my own
mind months before, and had never regretted my decision. I should have
thought it morbid...unnatural...to go over the whole subject again...to
let it affect a situation that had come about...so much later...so
unexpectedly."
"Did you never feel that, later, if I came to know--if others came to
know--it might be difficult----?"
"No; for I didn't care for the others--and I believed that, whatever
your own feelings were, you would know I had done what I thought right."
She spoke the words proudly, strongly, and for the first time the hard
lines of his face relaxed, and a slight tremor crossed it.
"If you believed this, why have you been letting that cur blackmail
you?"
"Because when he began I saw for the first time that what I had done
might be turned against me by--by those who disliked our marriage. And I
was afraid for my happiness. That was my weakness...it is what I am
suffering for now."
"_Suffering_!" he echoed ironically, as though she had presumed to apply
to herself a word of which he had the grim monopoly. He rose and took a
few aimless steps; then he halted before her.
"That day--last month--when you asked me for money...was it...?"
"Yes----" she said, her head sinking.
He laughed. "You couldn't tell me--but you could use my money to bribe
that fellow to conspire with you!"
"I had none of my own."
"No--nor I either! You used _her_ money.--God!" he groaned, turning away
with clenched hands.
Justine had risen also, and she stood motionless, her hands clasped
against her breast, in the drawn shrinking attitude of a fugitive
overtaken by a blinding storm. He moved back to her with an appealing
gesture.
"And you didn't see--it didn't occur to you--that your doing...as you
did...was an obstacle--an insurmountable obstacle--to our ever ...?"
She cut him short with an indignant cry. "No! No! for it was _not_. How
could it have anything to do with what...came after...with you or me? I
did it only for Bessy--it concerned only Bessy!"
"Ah, don't name her!" broke from him harshly, and she drew back, cut to
the heart.
There was another pause, during which he seemed to fall into a kind of
dazed irresolution, his head on his breast, as though unconscious of her
presence. Then he roused himself and went to the door.
As he passed her she sprang after him. "John--John! Is that all you have
to say?"
"What more is there?"
"What more? Everything!--What right have you to turn from me as if I
were a murderess? I did nothing but what your own reason, your own
arguments, have justified a hundred times! I made a mistake in not
telling you at once--but a mistake is not a crime. It can't be your real
feeling that turns you from me--it must be the dread of what other
people would think! But when have you cared for what other people
thought? When have your own actions been governed by it?"
He moved another step without speaking, and she caught him by the arm.
"No! you sha'n't go--not like that!--Wait!"
She turned and crossed the room. On the lower shelf of the little table
by her bed a few books were ranged: she stooped and drew one hurriedly
forth, opening it at the fly-leaf as she went back to Amherst.
"There--read that. The book was at Lynbrook--in your room--and I came
across it by chance the very day...."
It was the little volume of Bacon which she was thrusting at him. He
took it with a bewildered look, as if scarcely following what she said.
"Read it--read it!" she commanded; and mechanically he read out the
words he had written.
"_La vraie morale se moque de la morale.... We perish because we follow
other men's examples.... Socrates called the opinions of the many
Lamiae._--Good God!" he exclaimed, flinging the book from him with a
gesture of abhorrence.
Justine watched him with panting lips, her knees trembling under her.
"But you wrote it--you wrote it! I thought you meant it!" she cried, as
the book spun across a table and dropped to the floor.
He looked at her coldly, almost apprehensively, as if she had grown
suddenly dangerous and remote; then he turned and walked out of the
room.
* * * * *
The striking of the clock roused her. She rose to her feet, rang the
bell, and told the maid, through the door, that she had a headache, and
was unable to see Miss Cicely. Then she turned back into the room, and
darkness closed on her. She was not the kind to take grief passively--it
drove her in anguished pacings up and down the floor. She walked and
walked till her legs flagged under her; then she dropped stupidly into
the chair where Amherst had sat....
All her world had crumbled about her. It was as if some law of mental
gravity had been mysteriously suspended, and every firmly-anchored
conviction, every accepted process of reasoning, spun disconnectedly
through space. Amherst had not understood her--worse still, he had
judged her as the world might judge her! The core of her misery was
there. With terrible clearness she saw the suspicion that had crossed
his mind--the suspicion that she had kept silence in the beginning
because she loved him, and feared to lose him if she spoke.
And what if it were true? What if her unconscious guilt went back even
farther than his thought dared to track it? She could not now recall a
time when she had not loved him. Every chance meeting with him, from
their first brief talk at Hanaford, stood out embossed and glowing
against the blur of lesser memories. Was it possible that she had loved
him during Bessy's life--that she had even, sub-consciously, blindly,
been urged by her feeling for him to perform the act?
But she shook herself free from this morbid horror--the rebound of
health was always prompt in her, and her mind instinctively rejected
every form of moral poison. No! Her motive had been normal, sane and
justifiable--completely justifiable. Her fault lay in having dared to
rise above conventional restrictions, her mistake in believing that her
husband could rise with her. These reflections steadied her but they did
not bring much comfort. For her whole life was centred in Amherst, and
she saw that he would never be able to free himself from the traditional
view of her act. In looking back, and correcting her survey of his
character in the revealing light of the last hours, she perceived that,
like many men of emancipated thought, he had remained subject to the old
conventions of feeling. And he had probably never given much thought to
women till he met her--had always been content to deal with them in the
accepted currency of sentiment. After all, it was the currency they
liked best, and for which they offered their prettiest wares!
But what of the intellectual accord between himself and her? She had not
been deceived in that! He and she had really been wedded in mind as well
as in heart. But until now there had not arisen in their lives one of
those searching questions which call into play emotions rooted far below
reason and judgment, in the dark primal depths of inherited feeling. It
is easy to judge impersonal problems intellectually, turning on them the
full light of acquired knowledge; but too often one must still grope
one's way through the personal difficulty by the dim taper carried in
long-dead hands....
But was there then no hope of lifting one's individual life to a clearer
height of conduct? Must one be content to think for the race, and to
feel only--feel blindly and incoherently--for one's self? And was it not
from such natures as Amherst's--natures in which independence of
judgment was blent with strong human sympathy--that the liberating
impulse should come?
Her mind grew weary of revolving in this vain circle of questions. The
fact was that, in their particular case, Amherst had not risen above
prejudice and emotion; that, though her act was one to which his
intellectual sanction was given, he had turned from her with instinctive
repugnance, had dishonoured her by the most wounding suspicions. The
tie between them was forever stained and debased.
Justine's long hospital-discipline made it impossible for her to lose
consciousness of the lapse of time, or to let her misery thicken into
mental stupor. She could not help thinking and moving; and she presently
lifted herself to her feet, turned on the light, and began to prepare
for dinner. It would be terrible to face her husband across Mr.
Langhope's pretty dinner-table, and afterward in the charming
drawing-room, with its delicate old ornaments and intimate luxurious
furniture; but she could not continue to sit motionless in the dark: it
was her innermost instinct to pick herself up and go on.
While she dressed she listened anxiously for Amherst's step in the next
room; but there was no sound, and when she dragged herself downstairs
the drawing-room was empty, and the parlour-maid, after a decent delay,
came to ask if dinner should be postponed.
She said no, murmuring some vague pretext for her husband's absence, and
sitting alone through the succession of courses which composed the brief
but carefully-studied _menu_. When this ordeal was over she returned to
the drawing-room and took up a book. It chanced to be a new volume on
labour problems, which Amherst must have brought back with him from
Westmore; and it carried her thoughts instantly to the mills. Would
this disaster poison their work there as well as their personal
relation? Would he think of her as carrying contamination even into the
task their love had illumined?
The hours went on without his returning, and at length it occurred to
her that he might have taken the night train to Hanaford. Her heart
contracted at the thought: she remembered--though every nerve shrank
from the analogy--his sudden flight at another crisis in his life, and
she felt obscurely that if he escaped from her now she would never
recover her hold on him. But could he be so cruel--could he wish any one
to suffer as she was suffering?
At ten o'clock she could endure the drawing-room no longer, and went up
to her room again. She undressed slowly, trying to prolong the process
as much as possible, to put off the period of silence and inaction which
would close in on her when she lay down on her bed. But at length the
dreaded moment came--there was nothing more between her and the night.
She crept into bed and put out the light; but as she slipped between the
cold sheets a trembling seized her, and after a moment she drew on her
dressing-gown again and groped her way to the lounge by the fire.
She pushed the lounge closer to the hearth and lay down, still
shivering, though she had drawn the quilted coverlet up to her chin. She
lay there a long time, with closed eyes, in a mental darkness torn by
sudden flashes of memory. In one of these flashes a phrase of Amherst's
stood out--a word spoken at Westmore, on the day of the opening of the
Emergency Hospital, about a good-looking young man who had called to see
her. She remembered Amherst's boyish burst of jealousy, his sudden
relief at the thought that the visitor might have been Wyant. And no
doubt it _was_ Wyant--Wyant who had come to Hanaford to threaten her,
and who, baffled by her non-arrival, or for some other unexplained
reason, had left again without carrying out his purpose.
It was dreadful to think by how slight a chance her first draught of
happiness had escaped that drop of poison; yet, when she understood, her
inward cry was: "If it had happened, my dearest need not have
suffered!"... Already she was feeling Amherst's pain more than her own,
understanding that it was harder to bear than hers because it was at war
with all the reflective part of his nature.
As she lay there, her face pressed into the cushions, she heard a sound
through the silent house--the opening and closing of the outer door. She
turned cold, and lay listening with strained ears.... Yes; now there was
a step on the stairs--her husband's step! She heard him turn into his
own room. The throbs of her heart almost deafened her--she only
distinguished confusedly that he was moving about within, so close that
it was as if she felt his touch. Then her door opened and he entered.
He stumbled slightly in the darkness before he found the switch of the
lamp; and as he bent over it she saw that his face was flushed, and that
his eyes had an excited light which, in any one less abstemious, might
almost have seemed like the effect of wine.
"Are you awake?" he asked.
She started up against the cushions, her black hair streaming about her
small ghostly face.
"Yes."
He walked over to the lounge and dropped into the low chair beside it.
"I've given that cur a lesson he won't forget," he exclaimed, breathing
hard, the redness deepening in his face.
She turned on him in joy and trembling. "John!--Oh, John! You didn't
follow him? Oh, what happened? What have you done?"
"No. I didn't follow him. But there are some things that even the powers
above can't stand. And so they managed to let me run across him--by the
merest accident--and I gave him something to remember."
He spoke in a strong clear voice that had a brightness like the
brightness in his eyes. She felt its heat in her veins--the primitive
woman in her glowed at contact with the primitive man. But reflection
chilled her the next moment.
"But why--why? Oh, how could you? Where did it happen--oh, not in the
street?"
As she questioned him, there rose before her the terrified vision of a
crowd gathering--the police, newspapers, a hideous publicity. He must
have been mad to do it--and yet he must have done it because he loved
her!
"No--no. Don't be afraid. The powers looked after that too. There was no
one about--and I don't think he'll talk much about it."
She trembled, fearing yet adoring him. Nothing could have been more
unlike the Amherst she fancied she knew than this act of irrational
anger which had magically lifted the darkness from his spirit; yet,
magically also, it gave him back to her, made them one flesh once more.
And suddenly the pressure of opposed emotions became too strong, and she
burst into tears.
She wept painfully, violently, with the resistance of strong natures
unused to emotional expression; till at length, through the tumult of
her tears, she felt her husband's reassuring touch.
"Justine," he said, speaking once more in his natural voice.
She raised her face from her hands, and they looked at each other.
"Justine--this afternoon--I said things I didn't mean to say."
Her lips parted, but her throat was still full of sobs, and she could
only look at him while the tears ran down.
"I believe I understand now," he continued, in the same quiet tone.
Her hand shrank from his clasp, and she began to tremble again. "Oh, if
you only _believe_...if you're not sure...don't pretend to be!"
He sat down beside her and drew her into his arms. "I am sure," he
whispered, holding her close, and pressing his lips against her face and
hair.
"Oh, my husband--my husband! You've come back to me?"
He answered her with more kisses, murmuring through them: "Poor
child--poor child--poor Justine...." while he held her fast.
With her face against him she yielded to the childish luxury of
murmuring out unjustified fears. "I was afraid you had gone back to
Hanaford----"
"Tonight? To Hanaford?"
"To tell your mother."
She felt a contraction of the arm embracing her, as though a throb of
pain had stiffened it.
"I shall never tell any one," he said abruptly; but as he felt in her a
responsive shrinking he gathered her close again, whispering through the
hair that fell about her cheek: "Don't talk, dear...let us never talk
of it again...." And in the clasp of his arms her terror and anguish
subsided, giving way, not to the deep peace of tranquillized thought,
but to a confused well-being that lulled all thought to sleep.
XXXVII
BUT thought could never be long silent between them; and Justine's
triumph lasted but a day.
With its end she saw what it had been made of: the ascendency of youth
and sex over his subjugated judgment. Her first impulse was to try and
maintain it--why not use the protective arts with which love inspired
her? She who lived so keenly in the brain could live as intensely in her
feelings; her quick imagination tutored her looks and words, taught her
the spells to weave about shorn giants. And for a few days she and
Amherst lost themselves in this self-evoked cloud of passion, both
clinging fast to the visible, the palpable in their relation, as if
conscious already that its finer essence had fled.
Amherst made no allusion to what had passed, asked for no details,
offered no reassurances--behaved as if the whole episode had been
effaced from his mind. And from Wyant there came no sound: he seemed to
have disappeared from life as he had from their talk.
Toward the end of the week Amherst announced that he must return to
Hanaford; and Justine at once declared her intention of going with him.
He seemed surprised, disconcerted almost; and for the first time the
shadow of what had happened fell visibly between them.
"But ought you to leave Cicely before Mr. Langhope comes back?" he
suggested.
"He will be here in two days."
"But he will expect to find you."
"It is almost the first of April. We are to have Cicely with us for the
summer. There is no reason why I should not go back to my work at
Westmore."
There was in fact no reason that he could produce; and the next day they
returned to Hanaford together.
With her perceptions strung to the last pitch of sensitiveness, she felt
a change in Amherst as soon as they re-entered Bessy's house. He was
still scrupulously considerate, almost too scrupulously tender; but with
a tinge of lassitude, like a man who tries to keep up under the
stupefying approach of illness. And she began to hate the power by which
she held him. It was not thus they had once walked together, free in
mind though so linked in habit and feeling; when their love was not a
deadening drug but a vivifying element that cleared thought instead of
stifling it. There were moments when she felt that open alienation would
be easier, because it would be nearer the truth. And at such moments
she longed to speak, to beg him to utter his mind, to go with her once
for all into the depths of the subject they continued to avoid. But at
the last her heart always failed her: she could not face the thought of
losing him, of hearing him speak estranging words to her.
They had been at Hanaford for about ten days when, one morning at
breakfast, Amherst uttered a sudden exclamation over a letter he was
reading.
"What is it?" she asked in a tremor.
He had grown very pale, and was pushing the hair from his forehead with
the gesture habitual to him in moments of painful indecision.
"What is it?" Justine repeated, her fear growing.
"Nothing----" he began, thrusting the letter under the pile of envelopes
by his plate; but she continued to look at him anxiously, till she drew
his eyes to hers.
"Mr. Langhope writes that they've appointed Wyant to Saint
Christopher's," he said abruptly.
"Oh, the letter--we forgot the letter!" she cried.
"Yes--we forgot the letter."
"But how dare he----?"
Amherst said nothing, but the long silence between them seemed full of
ironic answers, till she brought out, hardly above her breath: "What
shall you do?"
"Write at once--tell Mr. Langhope he's not fit for the place."
"Of course----" she murmured.
He went on tearing open his other letters, and glancing at their
contents. She leaned back in her chair, her cup of coffee untasted,
listening to the recurrent crackle of torn paper as he tossed aside one
letter after another.
Presently he rose from his seat, and as she followed him from the
dining-room she noticed that his breakfast had also remained untasted.
He gathered up his letters and walked toward the smoking-room; and after
a moment's hesitation she joined him.
"John," she said from the threshold.
He was just seating himself at his desk, but he turned to her with an
obvious effort at kindness which made the set look of his face the more
marked.
She closed the door and went up to him.
"If you write that to Mr. Langhope--Dr. Wyant will--will tell him," she
said.
"Yes--we must be prepared for that."
She was silent, and Amherst flung himself down on the leather ottoman
against the wall. She stood before him, clasping and unclasping her
hands in speechless distress.
"What would you have me do?" he asked at length, almost irritably.
"I only thought...he told me he would keep straight...if he only had a
chance," she faltered out.
Amherst lifted his head slowly, and looked at her. "You mean--I am to do
nothing? Is that it?"
She moved nearer to him with beseeching eyes. "I can't bear it.... I
can't bear that others should come between us," she broke out
passionately.
He made no answer, but she could see a look of suffering cross his face,
and coming still closer, she sank down on the ottoman, laying her hand
on his. "John...oh, John, spare me," she whispered.
For a moment his hand lay quiet under hers; then he drew it out, and
enclosed her trembling fingers.
"Very well--I'll give him a chance--I'll do nothing," he said, suddenly
putting his other arm about her.
The reaction caught her by the throat, forcing out a dry sob or two; and
as she pressed her face against him he raised it up and gently kissed
her.
But even as their lips met she felt that they were sealing a treaty with
dishonour. That his kiss should come to mean that to her! It was
unbearable--worse than any personal pain--the thought of dragging him
down to falsehood through her weakness.
She drew back and rose to her feet, putting aside his detaining hand.
"No--no! What am I saying? It can't be--you must tell the truth." Her
voice gathered strength as she spoke. "Oh, forget what I said--I didn't
mean it!"
But again he seemed sunk in inaction, like a man over whom some baneful
lethargy is stealing.
"John--John--forget!" she repeated urgently.
He looked up at her. "You realize what it will mean?"
"Yes--I realize.... But it must be.... And it will make no difference
between us...will it?"
"No--no. Why should it?" he answered apathetically.
"Then write--tell Mr. Langhope not to give him the place. I want it
over."
He rose slowly to his feet, without looking at her again, and walked
over to the desk. She sank down on the ottoman and watched him with
burning eyes while he drew forth a sheet of note-paper and began to
write.
But after he had written a few words he laid down his pen, and swung his
chair about so that he faced her.
"I can't do it in this way," he exclaimed.
"How then? What do you mean?" she said, starting up.
He looked at her. "Do you want the story to come from Wyant?"
"Oh----" She looked back at him with sudden insight. "You mean to tell
Mr. Langhope yourself?"
"Yes. I mean to take the next train to town and tell him."
Her trembling increased so much that she had to rest her hands against
the edge of the ottoman to steady herself. "But if...if after
all...Wyant should not speak?"
"Well--if he shouldn't? Could you bear to owe our safety to _him_?"
"Safety!"
"It comes to that, doesn't it, if _we're_ afraid to speak?"
She sat silent, letting the bitter truth of this sink into her till it
poured courage into her veins.
"Yes--it comes to that," she confessed.
"Then you feel as I do?"
"That you must go----?"
"That this is intolerable!"
The words struck down her last illusion, and she rose and went over to
the writing-table. "Yes--go," she said.
He stood up also, and took both her hands, not in a caress, but gravely,
almost severely.
"Listen, Justine. You must understand exactly what this means--may mean.
I am willing to go on as we are now...as long as we can...because I
love you...because I would do anything to spare you pain. But if I speak
I must say everything--I must follow this thing up to its uttermost
consequences. That's what I want to make clear to you."
Her heart sank with a foreboding of new peril. "What consequences?"
"Can't you see for yourself--when you look about this house?"
"This house----?"
He dropped her hands and took an abrupt turn across the room.
"I owe everything to her," he broke out, "all I am, all I have, all I
have been able to give you--and I must go and tell her father that
you...."
"Stop--stop!" she cried, lifting her hands as if to keep off a blow.
"No--don't make me stop. We must face it," he said doggedly.
"But this--this isn't the truth! You put it as if--almost as if----"
"Yes--don't finish.--Has it occurred to you that _he_ may think that?"
Amherst asked with a terrible laugh. But at that she recovered her
courage, as she always did when an extreme call was made on it.
"No--I don't believe it! If he _does_, it will be because you think it
yourself...." Her voice sank, and she lifted her hands and pressed them
to her temples. "And if you think it, nothing matters...one way or the
other...." She paused, and her voice regained its strength. "That is
what I must face before you go: what _you_ think, what _you_ believe of
me. You've never told me that."
Amherst, at the challenge, remained silent, while a slow red crept to
his cheek-bones.
"Haven't I told you by--by what I've done?" he said slowly.
"No--what you've done has covered up what you thought; and I've helped
you cover it--I'm to blame too! But it was not for this that we...that
we had that half-year together...not to sink into connivance and
evasion! I don't want another hour of sham happiness. I want the truth
from you, whatever it is."
He stood motionless, staring moodily at the floor. "Don't you see that's
my misery--that I don't know myself?"
"You don't know...what you think of me?"
"Good God, Justine, why do you try to strip life naked? I don't know
what's been going on in me these last weeks----"
"You must know what you think of my motive...for doing what I did."
She saw in his face how he shrank from the least allusion to the act
about which their torment revolved. But he forced himself to raise his
head and look at her. "I have never--for one moment--questioned your
motive--or failed to see that it was justified...under the
circumstances...."
"Oh, John--John!" she broke out in the wild joy of hearing herself
absolved; but the next instant her subtle perceptions felt the
unconscious reserve behind his admission.
"Your mind justifies me--not your heart; isn't _that_ your misery?" she
said.
He looked at her almost piteously, as if, in the last resort, it was
from her that light must come to him. "On my soul, I don't know...I
can't tell...it's all dark in me. I know you did what you thought
best...if I had been there, I believe I should have asked you to do
it...but I wish to God----"
She interrupted him sobbingly. "Oh, I ought never to have let you love
me! I ought to have seen that I was cut off from you forever. I have
brought you wretchedness when I would have given my life for you! I
don't deserve that you should forgive me for that."
Her sudden outbreak seemed to restore his self-possession. He went up to
her and took her hand with a quieting touch.
"There is no question of forgiveness, Justine. Don't let us torture each
other with vain repinings. Our business is to face the thing, and we
shall be better for having talked it out. I shall be better, for my
part, for having told Mr. Langhope. But before I go I want to be sure
that you understand the view he may take...and the effect it will
probably have on our future."
"Our future?" She started. "No, I don't understand."
Amherst paused a moment, as if trying to choose the words least likely
to pain her. "Mr. Langhope knows that my marriage was...unhappy; through
my fault, he no doubt thinks. And if he chooses to infer that...that you
and I may have cared for each other...before...and that it was _because_
there was a chance of recovery that you----"
"Oh----"
"We must face it," he repeated inflexibly. "And you must understand
that, if there is the faintest hint of this kind, I shall give up
everything here, as soon as it can be settled legally--God, how Tredegar
will like the job!--and you and I will have to go and begin life over
again...somewhere else."
For an instant a mad hope swelled in her--the vision of escaping with
him into new scenes, a new life, away from the coil of memories that
bound them down as in a net. But the reaction of reason came at
once--she saw him cut off from his chosen work, his career destroyed,
his honour clouded, above all--ah, this was what wrung them both!--his
task undone, his people flung back into the depths from which he had
lifted them. And all through her doing--all because she had clutched at
happiness with too rash a hand! The thought stung her to passionate
activity of mind--made her resolve to risk anything, dare anything,
before she involved him farther in her own ruin. She felt her brain
clear gradually, and the thickness dissolve in her throat.
"I understand," she said in a low voice, raising her eyes to his.
"And you're ready to accept the consequences? Think again before it's
too late."
She paused. "That is what I should like...what I wanted to ask you...the
time to think."
She saw a slight shade cross his face, as if he had not expected this
failure of courage in her; but he said quietly: "You don't want me to go
today?"
"Not today--give me one more day."
"Very well."
She laid a timid hand on his arm. "Please go out to Westmore as
usual--as if nothing had happened. And tonight...when you come back...I
shall have decided."
"Very well," he repeated.
"You'll be gone all day?"
He glanced at his watch. "Yes--I had meant to be; unless----"
"No; I would rather be alone. Good-bye," she said, letting her hand slip
softly along his coat-sleeve as he turned to the door.
XXXVIII
AT half-past six that afternoon, just as Amherst, on his return from the
mills, put the key into his door at Hanaford, Mrs. Ansell, in New York,
was being shown into Mr. Langhope's library.
As she entered, her friend rose from his chair by the fire, and turned
on her a face so disordered by emotion that she stopped short with an
exclamation of alarm.
"Henry--what has happened? Why did you send for me?"
"Because I couldn't go to you. I couldn't trust myself in the
streets--in the light of day."
"But why? What is it?--Not Cicely----?"
He struck both hands upward with a comprehensive gesture.
"Cicely--everyone--the whole world!" His clenched fist came down on the
table against which he was leaning. "Maria, my girl might have been
saved!"
Mrs. Ansell looked at him with growing perturbation. "Saved--Bessy's
life? But how? By whom?"
"She might have been allowed to live, I mean--to recover. She was
killed, Maria; that woman killed her!"
Mrs. Ansell, with another cry of bewilderment, let herself drop
helplessly into the nearest chair. "In heaven's name, Henry--what
woman?"
He seated himself opposite to her, clutching at his stick, and leaning
his weight heavily on it--a white dishevelled old man. "I wonder why you
ask--just to spare me?"
Their eyes met in a piercing exchange of question and answer, and Mrs.
Ansell tried to bring out reasonably: "I ask in order to understand what
you are saying."
"Well, then, if you insist on keeping up appearances--my daughter-in-law
killed my daughter. There you have it." He laughed silently, with a tear
on his reddened eye-lids.
Mrs. Ansell groaned. "Henry, you are raving--I understand less and
less."
"I don't see how I can speak more plainly. She told me so herself, in
this room, not an hour ago."
"She told you? Who told you?"
"John Amherst's wife. Told me she'd killed my child. It's as easy as
breathing--if you know how to use a morphia-needle."
Light seemed at last to break on his hearer. "Oh, my poor Henry--you
mean--she gave too much? There was some dreadful accident?"
"There was no accident. She killed my child--killed her deliberately.
Don't look at me as if I were a madman. She sat in that chair you're in
when she told me."
"Justine? Has she been here today?" Mrs. Ansell paused in a painful
effort to readjust her thoughts. "But _why_ did she tell you?"
"That's simple enough. To prevent Wyant's doing it."
"Oh----" broke from his hearer, in a long sigh of fear and intelligence.
Mr. Langhope looked at her with a smile of miserable exultation.
"You knew--you suspected all along?--But now you must speak out!" he
exclaimed with a sudden note of command.
She sat motionless, as if trying to collect herself. "I know nothing--I
only meant--why was this never known before?"
He was upon her at once. "You think--because they understood each other?
And now there's been a break between them? He wanted too big a share of
the spoils? Oh, it's all so abysmally vile!"
He covered his face with a shaking hand, and Mrs. Ansell remained
silent, plunged in a speechless misery of conjecture. At length she
regained some measure of her habitual composure, and leaning forward,
with her eyes on his face, said in a quiet tone: "If I am to help you,
you must try to tell me just what has happened."
He made an impatient gesture. "Haven't I told you? She found that her
accomplice meant to speak, and rushed to town to forestall him."
Mrs. Ansell reflected. "But why--with his place at Saint Christopher's
secured--did Dr. Wyant choose this time to threaten her--if, as you
imagine, he's an accomplice?"
"Because he's a drug-taker, and she didn't wish him to have the place."
"She didn't wish it? But that does not look as if she were afraid. She
had only to hold her tongue!"
Mr. Langhope laughed sardonically. "It's not quite so simple. Amherst
was coming to town to tell me."
"Ah--_he_ knows?"
"Yes--and she preferred that I should have her version first."
"And what is her version?"
The furrows of misery deepened in Mr. Langhope's face. "Maria--don't ask
too much of me! I can't go over it again. She says she wanted to spare
my child--she says the doctors were keeping her alive, torturing her
uselessly, as a...a sort of scientific experiment.... She forced on me
the hideous details...."
Mrs. Ansell waited a moment.
"Well! May it not be true?"
"Wyant's version is different. _He_ says Bessy would have recovered--he
says Garford thought so too."
"And what does she answer? She denies it?"
"No. She admits that Garford was in doubt. But she says the chance was
too remote--the pain too bad...that's her cue, naturally!"
Mrs. Ansell, leaning back in her chair, with hands meditatively
stretched along its arms, gave herself up to silent consideration of the
fragmentary statements cast before her. The long habit of ministering to
her friends in moments of perplexity and distress had given her an
almost judicial keenness in disentangling and coordinating facts
incoherently presented, and in seizing on the thread of motive that
connected them; but she had never before been confronted with a
situation so poignant in itself, and bearing so intimately on her
personal feelings; and she needed time to free her thoughts from the
impending rush of emotion.
At last she raised her head and said: "Why did Mr. Amherst let her come
to you, instead of coming himself?"
"He knows nothing of her being here. She persuaded him to wait a day,
and as soon as he had gone to the mills this morning she took the first
train to town."
"Ah----" Mrs. Ansell murmured thoughtfully; and Mr. Langhope rejoined,
with a conclusive gesture: "Do you want more proofs of panic-stricken
guilt?"
"Oh, guilt--" His friend revolved her large soft muff about a drooping
hand. "There's so much still to understand."
"Your mind does not, as a rule, work so slowly!" he said with some
asperity; but she paid no heed to his tone.
"Amherst, for instance--how long has he known of this?" she continued.
"A week or two only--she made that clear."
"And what is his attitude?"
"Ah--that, I conjecture, is just what she means to keep us from
knowing!"
"You mean she's afraid----?"
Mr. Langhope gathered his haggard brows in a frown. "She's afraid, of
course--mortally--I never saw a woman more afraid. I only wonder she had
the courage to face me."
"Ah--that's it! Why _did_ she face you? To extenuate her act--to give
you her version, because she feared his might be worse? Do you gather
that that was her motive?"
It was Mr. Langhope's turn to hesitate. He furrowed the thick Turkey rug
with the point of his ebony stick, pausing once or twice to revolve it
gimlet-like in a gap of the pile.
"Not her avowed motive, naturally."
"Well--at least, then, let me have that."
"Her avowed motive? Oh, she'd prepared one, of course--trust her to
have a dozen ready! The one she produced was--simply the desire to
protect her husband."
"Her husband? Does _he_ too need protection?"
"My God, if he takes her side----! At any rate, her fear seemed to be
that what she had done might ruin him; might cause him to feel--as well
he may!--that the mere fact of being her husband makes his situation as
Cicely's step-father, as my son-in-law, intolerable. And she came to
clear him, as it were--to find out, in short, on what terms I should be
willing to continue my present relations with him as though this hideous
thing had not been known to me."
Mrs. Ansell raised her head quickly. "Well--and what were your terms?"
He hesitated. "She spared me the pain of proposing any--I had only to
accept hers."
"Hers?"
"That she should disappear altogether from my sight--and from the
child's, naturally. Good heaven, I should like to include Amherst in
that! But I'm tied hand and foot, as you see, by Cicely's interests; and
I'm bound to say she exonerated him completely--completely!"
Mrs. Ansell was again silent, but a swift flight of thoughts traversed
her drooping face. "But if you are to remain on the old terms with her
husband, how is she to disappear out of your life without also
disappearing out of his?"
Mr. Langhope gave a slight laugh. "I leave her to work out that
problem."
"And you think Amherst will consent to such conditions?"
"He's not to know of them."
The unexpectedness of the reply reduced Mrs. Ansell to a sound of
inarticulate interrogation; and Mr. Langhope continued: "Not at first,
that is. She had thought it all out--foreseen everything; and she wrung
from me--I don't yet know how!--a promise that when I saw him I would
make it appear that I cleared him completely, not only of any possible
complicity, or whatever you choose to call it, but of any sort of
connection with the matter in my thoughts of him. I am, in short, to let
him feel that he and I are to continue on the old footing--and I agreed,
on the condition of her effacing herself somehow--of course on some
other pretext."
"Some other pretext? But what conceivable pretext? My poor friend, he
adores her!"
Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. "We haven't seen him since
this became known to him. _She_ has; and she let slip that he was
horror-struck."
Mrs. Ansell looked up with a quick exclamation. "Let slip? Isn't it
much more likely that she forced it on you--emphasized it to the last
limit of credulity?" She sank her hands to the arms of the chair, and
exclaimed, looking him straight in the eyes: "You say she was
frightened? It strikes me she was dauntless!"
Mr. Langhope stared a moment; then he said, with an ironic shrug: "No
doubt, then, she counted on its striking me too."
Mrs. Ansell breathed a shuddering sigh. "Oh, I understand your feeling
as you do--I'm deep in the horror of it myself. But I can't help seeing
that this woman might have saved herself--and that she's chosen to save
her husband instead. What I don't see, from what I know of him," she
musingly proceeded, "is how, on any imaginable pretext, she will induce
him to accept the sacrifice."
Mr. Langhope made a resentful movement. "If that's the only point your
mind dwells on----!"
Mrs. Ansell looked up. "It doesn't dwell anywhere as yet--except, my
poor Henry," she murmured, rising to move toward him, and softly laying
her hand on his bent shoulder--"except on your distress and misery--on
the very part I can't yet talk of, can't question you about...."
He let her hand rest there a moment; then he turned, and drawing it into
his own tremulous fingers, pressed it silently, with a clinging
helpless grasp that drew the tears to her eyes.
* * * * *
Justine Brent, in her earliest girlhood, had gone through one of those
emotional experiences that are the infantile diseases of the heart. She
had fancied herself beloved of a youth of her own age; had secretly
returned his devotion, and had seen it reft from her by another. Such an
incident, as inevitable as the measles, sometimes, like that mild
malady, leaves traces out of all proportion to its actual virulence. The
blow fell on Justine with tragic suddenness, and she reeled under it,
thinking darkly of death, and renouncing all hopes of future happiness.
Her ready pen often beguiled her into recording her impressions, and she
now found an escape from despair in writing the history of a damsel
similarly wronged. In her tale, the heroine killed herself; but the
author, saved by this vicarious sacrifice, lived, and in time even
smiled over her manuscript.
It was many years since Justine Amherst had recalled this youthful
incident; but the memory of it recurred to her as she turned from Mr.
Langhope's door. For a moment death seemed the easiest escape from what
confronted her; but though she could no longer medicine her despair by
turning it into fiction, she knew at once that she must somehow
transpose it into terms of action, that she must always escape from
life into more life, and not into its negation.
She had been carried into Mr. Langhope's presence by that expiatory
passion which still burns so high, and draws its sustenance from so deep
down, in the unsleeping hearts of women. Though she had never wavered in
her conviction that her act had been justified her ideas staggered under
the sudden comprehension of its consequences. Not till that morning had
she seen those consequences in their terrible, unsuspected extent, had
she understood how one stone rashly loosened from the laboriously
erected structure of human society may produce remote fissures in that
clumsy fabric. She saw that, having hazarded the loosening of the stone,
she should have held herself apart from ordinary human ties, like some
priestess set apart for the service of the temple. And instead, she had
seized happiness with both hands, taken it as the gift of the very fate
she had herself precipitated! She remembered some old Greek saying to
the effect that the gods never forgive the mortal who presumes to love
and suffer like a god. She had dared to do both, and the gods were
bringing ruin on that deeper self which had its life in those about her.
So much had become clear to her when she heard Amherst declare his
intention of laying the facts before Mr. Langhope. His few broken words
lit up the farthest verge of their lives. She saw that his
retrospective reverence for his wife's memory, which was far as possible
removed from the strong passion of the mind and senses that bound him to
herself, was indelibly stained and desecrated by the discovery that all
he had received from the one woman had been won for him by the
deliberate act of the other. This was what no reasoning, no appeal to
the calmer judgment, could ever, in his inmost thoughts, undo or
extenuate. It could find appeasement only in the renunciation of all
that had come to him from Bessy; and this renunciation, so different
from the mere sacrifice of material well-being, was bound up with
consequences so far-reaching, so destructive to the cause which had
inspired his whole life, that Justine felt the helpless terror of the
mortal who has launched one of the heavenly bolts.
She could think of no way of diverting it but the way she had chosen.
She must see Mr. Langhope first, must clear Amherst of the least faint
association with her act or her intention. And to do this she must
exaggerate, not her own compunction--for she could not depart from the
exact truth in reporting her feelings and convictions--but her husband's
first instinctive movement of horror, the revulsion of feeling her
confession had really produced in him. This was the most painful part of
her task, and for this reason her excited imagination clothed it with a
special expiatory value. If she could purchase Amherst's peace of mind,
and the security of his future, by confessing, and even
over-emphasizing, the momentary estrangement between them there would be
a bitter joy in such payment!
Her hour with Mr. Langhope proved the correctness of her intuition. She
could save Amherst only by effacing herself from his life: those about
him would be only too ready to let her bear the full burden of obloquy.
She could see that, for a dozen reasons, Mr. Langhope, even in the first
shock of his dismay, unconsciously craved a way of exonerating Amherst,
of preserving intact the relation on which so much of his comfort had
come to depend. And she had the courage to make the most of his desire,
to fortify it by isolating Amherst's point of view from hers; so that,
when the hour was over, she had the solace of feeling that she had
completely freed him from any conceivable consequence of her act.
So far, the impetus of self-sacrifice had carried her straight to her
goal; but, as frequently happens with such atoning impulses, it left her
stranded just short of any subsequent plan of conduct. Her next step,
indeed, was clear enough: she must return to Hanaford, explain to her
husband that she had felt impelled to tell her own story to Mr.
Langhope, and then take up her ordinary life till chance offered her a
pretext for fulfilling her promise. But what pretext was likely to
present itself? No symbolic horn would sound the hour of fulfillment;
she must be her own judge, and hear the call in the depths of her own
conscience.
XXXIX
WHEN Amherst, returning late that afternoon from Westmore, learned of
his wife's departure, and read the note she had left, he found it, for a
time, impossible to bring order out of the confusion of feeling produced
in him.
His mind had been disturbed enough before. All day, through the routine
of work at the mills, he had laboured inwardly with the difficulties
confronting him; and his unrest had been increased by the fact that his
situation bore an ironic likeness to that in which, from a far different
cause, he had found himself at the other crisis of his life. Once more
he was threatened with the possibility of having to give up Westmore, at
a moment when concentration of purpose and persistency of will were at
last beginning to declare themselves in tangible results. Before, he had
only given up dreams; now it was their fruition that he was asked to
surrender. And he was fixed in his resolve to withdraw absolutely from
Westmore if the statement he had to make to Mr. Langhope was received
with the least hint of an offensive mental reservation. All forms of
moral compromise had always been difficult to Amherst, and like many men
absorbed in large and complicated questions he craved above all
clearness and peace in his household relation. The first months of his
second marriage had brought him, as a part of richer and deeper joys,
this enveloping sense of a clear moral medium, in which no subterfuge or
equivocation could draw breath. He had felt that henceforth he could
pour into his work all the combative energy, the powers of endurance,
resistance, renovation, which had once been unprofitably dissipated in
the vain attempt to bring some sort of harmony into life with Bessy.
Between himself and Justine, apart from their love for each other, there
was the wider passion for their kind, which gave back to them an
enlarged and deepened reflection of their personal feeling. In such an
air it had seemed that no petty egotism could hamper their growth, no
misintelligence obscure their love; yet all the while this pure
happiness had been unfolding against a sordid background of falsehood
and intrigue from which his soul turned with loathing.
Justine was right in assuming that Amherst had never thought much about
women. He had vaguely regarded them as meant to people that hazy domain
of feeling designed to offer the busy man an escape from thought. His
second marriage, leading him to the blissful discovery that woman can
think as well as feel, that there are beings of the ornamental sex in
whom brain and heart have so enlarged each other that their emotions are
as clear as thought, their thoughts as warm as emotions--this discovery
had had the effect of making him discard his former summary conception
of woman as a bundle of inconsequent impulses, and admit her at a stroke
to full mental equality with her lord. The result of this act of
manumission was, that in judging Justine he could no longer allow for
what was purely feminine in her conduct. It was incomprehensible to him
that she, to whom truth had seemed the essential element of life, should
have been able to draw breath, and find happiness, in an atmosphere of
falsehood and dissimulation. His mind could assent--at least in the
abstract--to the reasonableness of her act; but he was still unable to
understand her having concealed it from him. He could enter far enough
into her feelings to allow for her having kept silence on his first
return to Lynbrook, when she was still under the strain of a prolonged
and terrible trial; but that she should have continued to do so when he
and she had discovered and confessed their love for each other, threw an
intolerable doubt on her whole course.
He stayed late at the mills, finding one pretext after another for
delaying his return to Hanaford, and trying, while he gave one part of
his mind to the methodical performance of his task, to adjust the other
to some definite view of the future. But all was darkened and confused
by the sense that, between himself and Justine, complete communion of
thought was no longer possible. It had, in fact, never existed; there
had always been a locked chamber in her mind, and he knew not yet what
other secrets might inhabit it.
The shock of finding her gone when he reached home gave a new turn to
his feelings. She had made no mystery of her destination, leaving word
with the servants that she had gone to town to see Mr. Langhope; and
Amherst found a note from her on his study table.
"I feel," she wrote, "that I ought to see Mr. Langhope myself, and be
the first to tell him what must be told. It was like you, dearest, to
wish to spare me this, but it would have made me more unhappy; and Mr.
Langhope might wish to hear the facts in my own words. I shall come back
tomorrow, and after that it will be for you to decide what must be
done."
The brevity and simplicity of the note were characteristic; in moments
of high tension Justine was always calm and direct. And it was like her,
too, not to make any covert appeal to his sympathy, not to seek to
entrap his judgment by caressing words and plaintive allusions. The
quiet tone in which she stated her purpose matched the firmness and
courage of the act, and for a moment Amherst was shaken by a revulsion
of feeling. Her heart was level with his, after all--if she had done
wrong she would bear the brunt of it alone. It was so exactly what he
himself would have felt and done in such a situation that faith in her
flowed back through all the dried channels of his heart. But an instant
later the current set the other way. The wretched years of his first
marriage had left in him a residue of distrust, a tendency to dissociate
every act from its ostensible motive. He had been too profoundly the
dupe of his own enthusiasm not to retain this streak of scepticism, and
it now moved him to ask if Justine's sudden departure had not been
prompted by some other cause than the one she avowed. Had that alone
actuated her, why not have told it to him, and asked his consent to her
plan? Why let him leave the house without a hint of her purpose, and
slip off by the first train as soon as he was safe at Westmore? Might it
not be that she had special reasons for wishing Mr. Langhope to _hear
her own version first_--that there were questions she wished to parry
herself, explanations she could trust no one to make for her? The
thought plunged Amherst into deeper misery. He knew not how to defend
himself against these disintegrating suspicions--he felt only that, once
the accord between two minds is broken, it is less easy to restore than
the passion between two hearts. He dragged heavily through his solitary
evening, and awaited with dread and yet impatience a message announcing
his wife's return.
* * * * *
It would have been easier--far easier--when she left Mr. Langhope's
door, to go straight out into the darkness and let it close in on her
for good.
Justine felt herself yielding to the spell of that suggestion as she
walked along the lamplit pavement, hardly conscious of the turn her
steps were taking. The door of the house which a few weeks before had
been virtually hers had closed on her without a question. She had been
suffered to go out into the darkness without being asked whither she was
going, or under what roof her night would be spent. The contrast between
her past and present sounded through the tumult of her thoughts like the
evil laughter of temptation. The house at Hanaford, to which she was
returning, would look at her with the same alien face--nowhere on earth,
at that moment, was a door which would open to her like the door of
home.
In her painful self-absorption she followed the side street toward
Madison Avenue, and struck southward down that tranquil thoroughfare.
There was a physical relief in rapid motion, and she walked on, still
hardly aware of her direction, toward the clustered lights of Madison
Square. Should she return to Hanaford, she had still several hours to
dispose of before the departure of the midnight train; and if she did
not return, hours and dates no longer existed for her.
It would be easier--infinitely easier--not to go back. To take up her
life with Amherst would, under any circumstances, be painful enough; to
take it up under the tacit restriction of her pledge to Mr. Langhope
seemed more than human courage could face. As she approached the square
she had almost reached the conclusion that such a temporary renewal was
beyond her strength--beyond what any standard of duty exacted. The
question of an alternative hardly troubled her. She would simply go on
living, and find an escape in work and material hardship. It would not
be hard for so inconspicuous a person to slip back into the obscure mass
of humanity.
She paused a moment on the edge of the square, vaguely seeking a
direction for her feet that might permit the working of her thoughts to
go on uninterrupted; and as she stood there, her eyes fell on the bench
near the corner of Twenty-sixth Street, where she had sat with Amherst
on the day of his flight from Lynbrook. He too had dreamed of escaping
from insoluble problems into the clear air of hard work and simple
duties; and she remembered the words with which she had turned him back.
The cases, of course, were not identical, since he had been flying in
anger and wounded pride from a situation for which he was in no wise to
blame; yet, if even at such a moment she had insisted on charity and
forbearance, how could she now show less self-denial than she had
exacted of him?
"If you 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...." That was
how she had put it to him, and how, with the mere change of a name, she
must now, for reasons as cogent, put it to herself. It was just as much
a part of the course she had planned to return to her husband now, and
take up their daily life together, as it would, later on, be her duty to
drop out of that life, when her doing so could no longer involve him in
the penalty to be paid.
She stood a little while looking at the bench on which they had sat, and
giving thanks in her heart for the past strength which was now helping
to build up her failing courage: such a patchwork business are our best
endeavours, yet so faithfully does each weak upward impulse reach back a
hand to the next.
* * * * *
Justine's explanation of her visit to Mr. Langhope was not wholly
satisfying to her husband. She did not conceal from him that the scene
had been painful, but she gave him to understand, as briefly as
possible, that Mr. Langhope, after his first movement of uncontrollable
distress, had seemed able to make allowances for the pressure under
which she had acted, and that he had, at any rate, given no sign of
intending to let her confession make any change in the relation between
the households. If she did not--as Amherst afterward recalled--put all
this specifically into words, she contrived to convey it in her manner,
in her allusions, above all in her recovered composure. She had the
demeanour of one who has gone through a severe test of strength, but
come out of it in complete control of the situation. There was something
slightly unnatural in this prompt solution of so complicated a
difficulty, and it had the effect of making Amherst ask himself what, to
produce such a result, must have been the gist of her communication to
Mr. Langhope. If the latter had shown any disposition to be cruel, or
even unjust, Amherst's sympathies would have rushed instantly to his
wife's defence; but the fact that there was apparently to be no call on
them left his reason free to compare and discriminate, with the final
result that the more he pondered on his father-in-law's attitude the
less intelligible it became.
A few days after Justine's return he was called to New York on business;
and before leaving he told her that he should of course take the
opportunity of having a talk with Mr. Langhope.
She received the statement with the gentle composure from which she had
not departed since her return from town; and he added tentatively, as if
to provoke her to a clearer expression of feeling: "I shall not be
satisfied, of course, till I see for myself just how he feels--just how
much, at bottom, this has affected him--since my own future relation to
him will, as I have already told you, depend entirely on his treatment
of you."
She met this without any sign of disturbance. "His treatment of me was
very kind," she said. "But would it not, on your part," she continued
hesitatingly, "be kinder not to touch on the subject so soon again?"
The line deepened between his brows. "Touch on it? I sha'n't rest till
I've gone to the bottom of it! Till then, you must understand," he
summed up with decision, "I feel myself only on sufferance here at
Westmore."
"Yes--I understand," she assented; and as he bent over to kiss her for
goodbye a tenuous impenetrable barrier seemed to lie between their lips.
* * * * *
It was Justine's turn to await with a passionate anxiety her husband's
home-coming; and when, on the third day, he reappeared, her dearly
acquired self-control gave way to a tremulous eagerness. This was, after
all, the turning-point in their lives: everything depended on how Mr.
Langhope had "played up" to his cue; had kept to his side of their bond.
Amherst's face showed signs of emotional havoc: when feeling once broke
out in him it had full play, and she could see that his hour with Mr.
Langhope had struck to the roots of life. But the resultant expression
was one of invigoration, not defeat; and she gathered at a glance that
her partner had not betrayed her. She drew a tragic solace from the
success of her achievement; yet it flung her into her husband's arms
with a passion of longing to which, as she instantly felt, he did not as
completely respond.
There was still, then, something "between" them: somewhere the mechanism
of her scheme had failed, or its action had not produced the result she
had counted on.
As soon as they were alone in the study she said, as quietly as she
could: "You saw your father-in-law? You talked with him?"
"Yes--I spent the afternoon with him. Cicely sent you her love."
She coloured at the mention of the child's name and murmured: "And Mr.
Langhope?"
"He is perfectly calm now--perfectly impartial.--This business has made
me feel," Amherst added abruptly, "that I have never been quite fair to
him. I never thought him a magnanimous man."
"He has proved himself so," Justine murmured, her head bent low over a
bit of needlework; and Amherst affirmed energetically: "He has been more
than that--generous!"
She looked up at him with a smile. "I am so glad, dear; so glad there is
not to be the least shadow between you...."
"No," Amherst said, his voice flagging slightly. There was a pause, and
then he went on with renewed emphasis: "Of course I made my point clear
to him."
"Your point?"
"That I stand or fall by his judgment of you."
Oh, if he had but said it more tenderly! But he delivered it with the
quiet resolution of a man who contends for an abstract principle of
justice, and not for a passion grown into the fibres of his heart!
"You are generous too," she faltered, her voice trembling a little.
Amherst frowned; and she perceived that any hint, on her part, of
recognizing the slightest change in their relations was still like
pressure on a painful bruise.
"There is no need for such words between us," he said impatiently; "and
Mr. Langhope's attitude," he added, with an effort at a lighter tone,
"has made it unnecessary, thank heaven, that we should ever revert to
the subject again."
He turned to his desk as he spoke, and plunged into perusal of the
letters that had accumulated in his absence.
* * * * *
There was a temporary excess of work at Westmore, and during the days
that followed he threw himself into it with a zeal that showed Justine
how eagerly he sought any pretext for avoiding confidential moments. The
perception was painful enough, yet not as painful as another discovery
that awaited her. She too had her tasks at Westmore: the supervision of
the hospital, the day nursery, the mothers' club, and the various other
organizations whereby she and Amherst were trying to put some sort of
social unity into the lives of the mill-hands; and when, on the day
after his return from New York, she presented herself, as usual, at the
Westmore office, where she was in the habit of holding a brief
consultation with him before starting on her rounds, she was at once
aware of a new tinge of constraint in his manner. It hurt him, then, to
see her at Westmore--hurt him more than to live with her, at Hanaford,
under Bessy's roof! For it was there, at the mills, that his real life
was led, the life with which Justine had been most identified, the life
that had been made possible for both by the magnanimity of that other
woman whose presence was now forever between them.
Justine made no sign. She resumed her work as though unconscious of any
change; but whereas in the past they had always found pretexts for
seeking each other out, to discuss the order of the day's work, or
merely to warm their hearts by a rapid word or two, now each went a
separate way, sometimes not meeting till they regained the house at
night-fall.
And as the weeks passed she began to understand that, by a strange
inversion of probability, the relation between Amherst and herself was
to be the means of holding her to her compact with Mr. Langhope--if
indeed it were not nearer the truth to say that it had made such a
compact unnecessary. Amherst had done his best to take up their life
together as though there had been no break in it; but slowly the fact
was being forced on her that by remaining with him she was subjecting
him to intolerable suffering--was coming to be the personification of
the very thoughts and associations from which he struggled to escape.
Happily her promptness of action had preserved Westmore to him, and in
Westmore she believed that he would in time find a refuge from even the
memory of what he was now enduring. But meanwhile her presence kept the
thought alive; and, had every other incentive lost its power, this would
have been enough to sustain her. Fate had, ironically enough, furnished
her with an unanswerable reason for leaving Amherst; the impossibility
of their keeping up such a relation as now existed between them would
soon become too patent to be denied.
Meanwhile, as summer approached, she knew that external conditions would
also call upon her to act. The visible signal for her withdrawal would
be Cicely's next visit to Westmore. The child's birthday fell in early
June; and Amherst, some months previously, had asked that she should be
permitted to spend it at Hanaford, and that it should be chosen as the
date for the opening of the first model cottages at Hopewood.
It was Justine who had originated the idea of associating Cicely's
anniversaries with some significant moment in the annals of the mill
colony; and struck by the happy suggestion, he had at once applied
himself to hastening on the work at Hopewood. The eagerness of both
Amherst and Justine that Cicely should be identified with the developing
life of Westmore had been one of the chief influences in reconciling Mr.
Langhope to his son-in-law's second marriage. Husband and wife had
always made it clear that they regarded themselves as the mere trustees
of the Westmore revenues, and that Cicely's name should, as early as
possible, be associated with every measure taken for the welfare of the
people. But now, as Justine knew, the situation was changed; and Cicely
would not be allowed to come to Hanaford until she herself had left it.
The manifold threads of divination that she was perpetually throwing out
in Amherst's presence told her, without word or sign on his part, that
he also awaited Cicely's birthday as a determining date in their lives.
He spoke confidently, and as a matter of course, of Mr. Langhope's
bringing his grand-daughter at the promised time; but Justine could hear
a note of challenge in his voice, as though he felt that Mr. Langhope's
sincerity had not yet been put to the test.
As the time drew nearer it became more difficult for her to decide just
how she should take the step she had determined on. She had no material
anxiety for the future, for although she did not mean to accept a penny
from her husband after she had left him, she knew it would be easy for
her to take up her nursing again; and she knew also that her hospital
connections would enable her to find work in a part of the country far
enough distant to remove her entirely from his life. But she had not yet
been able to invent a reason for leaving that should be convincing
enough to satisfy him, without directing his suspicions to the truth. As
she revolved the question she suddenly recalled an exclamation of
Amherst's--a word spoken as they entered Mr. Langhope's door, on the
fatal afternoon when she had found Wyant's letter awaiting her.
"There's nothing you can't make people believe, you little Jesuit!"
She had laughed in pure joy at his praise of her; for every bantering
phrase had then been a caress. But now the words returned with a
sinister meaning. She knew they were true as far as Amherst was
concerned: in the arts of casuistry and equivocation a child could have
outmatched him, and she had only to exert her will to dupe him as deeply
as she pleased. Well! the task was odious, but it was needful: it was
the bitterest part of her expiation that she must deceive him once more
to save him from the results of her former deception. This decision once
reached, every nerve in her became alert for an opportunity to do the
thing and have it over; so that, whenever they were alone together, she
was in an attitude of perpetual tension, her whole mind drawn up for its
final spring.
The decisive word came, one evening toward the end of May, in the form
of an allusion on Amherst's part to Cicely's approaching visit. Husband
and wife were seated in the drawing-room after dinner, he with a book in
hand, she bending, as usual, over the needlework which served at once as
a pretext for lowered eyes, and as a means of disguising her fixed
preoccupation.