The Fruit of the Tree Part 67

"No." She smiled a little, as if to give herself time. "But I mean that you shall. If I were a man I suppose I couldn't, because a man's code of honour is such a clumsy cast-iron thing. But a woman's, luckily, can be cut over--if she's clever--to fit any new occasion; and in this case I should be willing to reduce mine to tatters if necessary."

Amherst's look of bewilderment deepened. "What is it that I don't understand?" he asked at length, in a low voice.

"Well--first of all, why Mr. Langhope had the right to ask you to send for your wife."

"The right?"

"You don't recognize such a right on his part?"

"No--why should I?"

"Supposing she had left you by his wish?"

"His wish? _His----?_"

He was on his feet now, gazing at her blindly, while the solid world seemed to grow thin about him. Her next words reduced it to a mist.

"My poor Amherst--why else, on earth, should she have left you?"

She brought it out clearly, in her small chiming tones; and as the sound travelled toward him it seemed to gather momentum, till her words rang through his brain as if every incomprehensible incident in the past had suddenly boomed forth the question. Why else, indeed, should she have left him? He stood motionless for a while; then he approached Mrs.

Ansell and said: "Tell me."

She drew farther back into her corner of the sofa, waving him to a seat beside her, as though to bring his inquisitory eyes on a level where her own could command them; but he stood where he was, unconscious of her gesture, and merely repeating: "Tell me."

She may have said to herself that a woman would have needed no farther telling; but to him she only replied, slanting her head up to his: "To spare you and himself pain--to keep everything, between himself and you, as it had been before you married her."

He dropped down beside her at that, grasping the back of the sofa as if he wanted something to clutch and throttle. The veins swelled in his temples, and as he pushed back his tossed hair Mrs. Ansell noticed for the first time how gray it had grown on the under side.

"And he asked this of my wife--he accepted it?'"

"Haven't _you_ accepted it?"

"I? How could I guess her reasons--how could I imagine----?"

Mrs. Ansell raised her brows a hair's breadth at that. "I don't know.

But as a fact, he didn't ask--it was she who offered, who forced it on him, even!"

"Forced her going on him?"

"In a sense, yes; by making it appear that _you_ felt as he did about--about poor Bessy's death: that the thought of what had happened at that time was as abhorrent to you as to him--that _she_ was as abhorrent to you. No doubt she foresaw that, had she permitted the least doubt on that point, there would have been no need of her leaving you, since the relation between yourself and Mr. Langhope would have been altered--destroyed...."

"Yes. I expected that--I warned her of it. But how did she make him think----?"

"How can I tell? To begin with, I don't know your real feeling. For all I know she was telling the truth--and Mr. Langhope of course thought she was."

"That I abhorred her? Oh----" he broke out, on his feet in an instant.

"Then why----?"

"Why did I let her leave me?" He strode across the room, as his habit was in moments of agitation, turning back to her again before he answered. "Because I _didn't_ know--didn't know anything! And because her insisting on going away like that, without any explanation, made me feel...imagine there was...something she didn't _want_ me to know...something she was afraid of not being able to hide from me if we stayed together any longer."

"Well--there was: the extent to which she loved you."

Mrs. Ansell; her hands clasped on her knee, her gaze holding his with a kind of visionary fixity, seemed to reconstruct the history of his past, bit by bit, with the words she was dragging out of him.

"I see it--I see it all now," she went on, with a repressed fervour that he had never divined in her. "It was the only solution for her, as well as for the rest of you. The more she showed her love, the more it would have cast a doubt on her motive...the greater distance she would have put between herself and you. And so she showed it in the only way that was safe for both of you, by taking herself away and hiding it in her heart; and before going, she secured your peace of mind, your future. If she ruined anything, she rebuilt the ruin. Oh, she paid--she paid in full!"

Justine had paid, yes--paid to the utmost limit of whatever debt toward society she had contracted by overstepping its laws. And her resolve to discharge the debt had been taken in a flash, as soon as she had seen that man can commit no act alone, whether for good or evil. The extent to which Amherst's fate was involved in hers had become clear to her with his first word of rea.s.surance, of faith in her motive. And instantly a plan for releasing him had leapt full-formed into her mind, and had been carried out with swift unflinching resolution. As he forced himself, now, to look down the suddenly illuminated past to the weeks which had elapsed between her visit to Mr. Langhope and her departure from Hanaford, he wondered not so much at her swiftness of resolve as at her firmness in carrying out her plan--and he saw, with a blinding flash of insight, that it was in her love for him that she had found her strength.

In all moments of strong mental tension he became totally unconscious of time and place, and he now remained silent so long, his hands clasped behind him, his eyes fixed on an indeterminate point in s.p.a.ce, that Mrs.

Ansell at length rose and laid a questioning touch on his arm.

"It's not true that you don't know where she is?" His face contracted.

"At this moment I don't. Lately she has preferred...not to write...."

"But surely you must know how to find her?"

He tossed back his hair with an energetic movement. "I should find her if I didn't know how!"

They stood confronted in a gaze of silent intensity, each penetrating farther into the mind of the other than would once have seemed possible to either one; then Amherst held out his hand abruptly. "Good-bye--and thank you," he said.

She detained him a moment. "We shall see you soon again--see you both?"

His face grew stern. "It's not to oblige Mr. Langhope that I am going to find my wife."

"Ah, now you are unjust to him!" she exclaimed.

"Don't let us speak of him!" he broke in.

"Why not? When it is from him the request comes--the entreaty--that everything in the past should be forgotten?"

"Yes--when it suits his convenience!"

"Do you imagine that--even judging him in that way--it has not cost him a struggle?"

"I can only think of what it has cost her!"

Mrs. Ansell drew a deep sighing breath. "Ah--but don't you see that she has gained her point, and that nothing else matters to her?"

"Gained her point? Not if, by that, you mean that things here can ever go back to the old state--that she and I can remain at Westmore after this!"

Mrs. Ansell dropped her eyes for a moment; then she lifted to his her sweet impenetrable face.

"Do you know what you have to do--both you and he? Exactly what she decides," she affirmed.