The Fruit of the Tree Part 37

How serious, she was to learn that very night, when, in the small hours, her friend burst in on her tearfully. Bessy was ruined--ruined--that was what Mr. Tredegar had come to tell her! She might have known he would not have travelled to Lynbrook for a trifle.... She had expected to find herself cramped, restricted--to be warned that she must "manage,"

hateful word!... But this! This was incredible! Unendurable! There was no money to build the gymnasium--none at all! And all because it had been swallowed up at Westmore--because the ridiculous changes there, the changes that n.o.body wanted, n.o.body approved of--that Trus...o...b..and all the other experts had opposed and derided from the first--these changes, even modified and arrested, had already involved so much of her income, that it might be years--yes, he said _years_!--before she would feel herself free again--free of her own fortune, of Cicely's fortune...of the money poor d.i.c.k Westmore had meant his wife and child to enjoy!

Justine listened anxiously to this confused outpouring of resentments.

Bessy's born incapacity for figures made it indeed possible that the facts came on her as a surprise--that she had quite forgotten the temporary reduction of her income, and had begun to imagine that what she had saved in one direction was hers to spend in another. All this was conceivable. But why had Mr. Tredegar drawn so dark a picture of the future? Or was it only that, thwarted of her immediate desire, Bessy's disappointment blackened the farthest verge of her horizon? Justine, though aware of her friend's lack of perspective, suspected that a conniving hand had helped to throw the prospect out of drawing....

Could it be possible, then, that Mr. Tredegar was among those who desired a divorce? That the influences at which Mrs. Ansell had hinted proceeded not only from Blanche Carbury and her group? Helpless amid this rush of forebodings, Justine could do no more than soothe and restrain--to reason would have been idle. She had never till now realized how completely she had lost ground with Bessy.

"The humiliation--before my friends! Oh, I was warned...my father, every one...for Cicely's sake I was warned...but I wouldn't listen--and _now_!

From the first it was all he cared for--in Europe, even, he was always dragging me to factories. _Me?_--I was only the owner of Westmore! He wanted power--power, that's all--when he lost it he left me...oh, I'm glad now my baby is dead! Glad there's nothing between us--nothing, nothing in the world to tie us together any longer!"

The disproportion between this violent grief and its trivial cause would have struck Justine as simply grotesque, had she not understood that the incident of the gymnasium, which followed with c.u.mulative pressure on a series of similar episodes, seemed to Bessy like the reaching out of a retaliatory hand--a mocking reminder that she was still imprisoned in the consequences of her unhappy marriage.

Such folly seemed past weeping for--it froze Justine's compa.s.sion into disdain, till she remembered that the sources of our sorrow are sometimes n.o.bler than their means of expression, and that a baffled unappeased love was perhaps the real cause of Bessy's anger against her husband.

At any rate, the moment was a critical one, and Justine remembered with a pang that Mrs. Ansell had foreseen such a contingency, and implored her to take measures against it. She had refused, from a sincere dread of precipitating a definite estrangement--but had she been right in judging the situation so logically? With a creature of Bessy's emotional uncertainties the result of contending influences was really incalculable--it might still be that, at this juncture, Amherst's return would bring about a reaction of better feelings....

Justine sat and mused on these things after leaving her friend exhausted upon a tearful pillow. She felt that she had perhaps taken too large a survey of the situation--that the question whether there could ever be happiness between this tormented pair was not one to concern those who struggled for their welfare. Most marriages are a patch-work of jarring tastes and ill-a.s.sorted ambitions--if here and there, for a moment, two colours blend, two textures are the same, so much the better for the pattern! Justine, certainly, could foresee in reunion no positive happiness for either of her friends; but she saw positive disaster for Bessy in separation from her husband....

Suddenly she rose from her chair by the falling fire, and crossed over to the writing-table. She would write to Amherst herself--she would tell him to come. The decision once reached, hope flowed back to her heart--the joy of action so often deceived her into immediate faith in its results!

"Dear Mr. Amherst," she wrote, "the last time I saw you, you told me you would remember what I said. I ask you to do so now--to remember that I urged you not to be away too long. I believe you ought to come back now, though I know Bessy will not ask you to. I am writing without her knowledge, but with the conviction that she needs you, though perhaps without knowing it herself...."

She paused, and laid down her pen. Why did it make her so happy to write to him? Was it merely the sense of recovered helpfulness, or something warmer, more personal, that made it a joy to trace his name, and to remind him of their last intimate exchange of words? Well--perhaps it was that too. There were moments when she was so mortally lonely that any sympathetic contact with another life sent a glow into her veins--that she was thankful to warm herself at any fire.

XXV

BESSY, languidly glancing through her midday mail some five days later, uttered a slight exclamation as she withdrew her finger-tip from the flap of the envelope she had begun to open.

It was a black sleety day, with an east wind bowing the trees beyond the drenched window-panes, and the two friends, after luncheon, had withdrawn to the library, where Justine sat writing notes for Bessy, while the latter lay back in her arm-chair, in the state of dreamy listlessness into which she always sank when not under the stimulus of amus.e.m.e.nt or exercise.

She sat suddenly upright as her eyes fell on the letter.

"I beg your pardon! I thought it was for me," she said, holding it out to Justine.

The latter reddened as she glanced at the superscription. It had not occurred to her that Amherst would reply to her appeal: she had pictured him springing on the first north-bound train, perhaps not even pausing to announce his return to his wife.... And to receive his letter under Bessy's eye was undeniably embarra.s.sing, since Justine felt the necessity of keeping her intervention secret.

But under Bessy's eye she certainly was--it continued to rest on her curiously, speculatively, with an under-gleam of malicious significance.

"So stupid of me--I can't imagine why I should have expected my husband to write to me!" Bessy went on, leaning back in lazy contemplation of her other letters, but still obliquely including Justine in her angle of vision.

The latter, after a moment's pause, broke the seal and read.

"Millfield, Georgia.

"My dear Miss Brent,

"Your letter reached me yesterday and I have thought it over carefully. I appreciate the feeling that prompted it--but I don't know that any friend, however kind and discerning, can give the final advice in such matters. You tell me you are sure my wife will not ask me to return--well, under present conditions that seems to me a sufficient reason for staying away.

"Meanwhile, I a.s.sure you that I have remembered all you said to me that day. I have made no binding arrangement here--nothing to involve my future action--and I have done this solely because you asked it. This will tell you better than words how much I value your advice, and what strong reasons I must have for not following it now.

"I suppose there are no more exploring parties in this weather. I wish I could show Cicely some of the birds down here.

"Yours faithfully, "John Amherst.

"Please don't let my wife ride Impulse."

Latent under Justine's acute consciousness of what this letter meant, was the sense of Bessy's inferences and conjectures. She could feel them actually piercing the page in her hand like some hypersensitive visual organ to which matter offers no obstruction. Or rather, baffled in their endeavour, they were evoking out of the unseen, heaven knew what fantastic structure of intrigue--scrawling over the innocent page with burning evidences of perfidy and collusion....

One thing became instantly clear to her: she must show the letter to Bessy. She ran her eyes over it again, trying to disentangle the consequences. There was the allusion to their talk in town--well, she had told Bessy of that! But the careless reference to their woodland excursions--what might not Bessy, in her present mood, make of it?

Justine's uppermost thought was of distress at the failure of her plan.

Perhaps she might still have induced Amherst to come back, had it not been for this accident; but now that hope was destroyed.

She raised her eyes and met Bessy's. "Will you read it?" she said, holding out the letter.

Bessy received it with lifted brows, and a protesting murmur--but as she read, Justine saw the blood mount under her clear skin, invade the temples, the nape, even the little flower-like ears; then it receded as suddenly, ebbing at last from the very lips, so that the smile with which she looked up from her reading was as white as if she had been under the stress of physical pain.

"So you have written my husband to come back?"

"As you see."

Bessy looked her straight in the eyes. "I am very much obliged to you--extremely obliged!"

Justine met the look quietly. "Which means that you resent my interference----"

"Oh, I leave you to call it that!" Bessy mocked, tossing the letter down on the table at her side.

"Bessy! Don't take it in that way. If I made a mistake I did so with the hope of helping you. How can I stand by, after all these months together, and see you deliberately destroying your life without trying to stop you?"

The smile withered on Bessy's lips. "It is very dear and good of you--I know you're never happy unless you're helping people--but in this case I can only repeat what my husband says. He and I don't often look at things in the same light--but I quite agree with him that the management of such matters is best left to--to the persons concerned."

Justine hesitated. "I might answer that, if you take that view, it was inconsistent of you to talk with me so openly. You've certainly made me feel that you wanted help--you've turned to me for it. But perhaps that does not justify my writing to Mr. Amherst without your knowing it."

Bessy laughed. "Ah, my dear, you knew that if you asked me the letter would never be sent!"

"Perhaps I did," said Justine simply. "I was trying to help you against your will."

"Well, you see the result." Bessy laid a derisive touch on the letter.

"Do you understand now whose fault it is if I am alone?"

Justine faced her steadily. "There is nothing in Mr. Amherst's letter to make me change my opinion. I still think it lies with you to bring him back."

Bessy raised a glittering face to her--all hardness and laughter. "Such modesty, my dear! As if I had a chance of succeeding where you failed!"