The Fruit of the Tree Part 33

"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 circ.u.mstances," 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 a.s.sault 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-a.s.sertion 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 pa.s.sion! 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 const.i.tuted 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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."