 Book Four, Chapter thirty-six, of the Fruit of the Tree. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Fruit of the Tree by Edith Wharton, Book Four, Chapter thirty-six. When Wyant had left the room and the house-store 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 a vowel in her defamers' 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 him 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 arm-chair 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 nearby, 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, emitting 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 hands 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 Lindbrook, 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 Hannaford, 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. Once 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 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 believe this, why have you been letting that curr blackmail you? Because when he began, I saw for the first time that what I had done might be turned against me 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 the 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, and 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 Bessie. It concerned only Bessie. 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! It might have you to turn from me as if I were a murderous. 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 shan'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 Lindbrook, 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. L'avré moral s'est mort de la morale. We perish because we follow other men's examples. Socrates called the opinions of the many Lamea. 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 Sicily. 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 further 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 Hannaford, stood out embossed and glowing against the blur of lesser memories. Was it possible that she had loved him during Bessie's life? That she had even, subconsciously, 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 centered in Amherst, and she saw that he would never be able to free himself from the traditional view of her act. 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 blend 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 dishonored 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. Lang Hope'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 parlor made, 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 labor 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 that occurred to her that he might have taken the night-train to Hanifurt. 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 anyone 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 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 Haniford 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 draft 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-ubstimious, 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 nearest 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 glow that 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 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'd gone back to Hannaford. Tonight to Hannaford? 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 tranquilized thought, but to a confused well-being that lulled all thought to sleep. Book 4. CHAPTER 37. OF THE FRUIT OF THE TREE. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. THE FRUIT OF THE TREE by Edith Wharton, Book 4, CHAPTER 37. 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 ascendancy 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. Just made no allusion to what had passed, asked for no details, offered no reassurances, behaved as if the whole episode had been afaced from his mind. And from Wyatt 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 Hannaford, 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 Sicily 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 Sicily 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 Hannaford together. With her perceptions strung to the last pitch of sensitiveness she felt a change in Amherst as soon as they re-entered Bessie'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 and 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 a strangeing words to her. They had been at Hannaford for about ten days when, one morning after 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 St. 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 it 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 dishonor, 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. What 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 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'm 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 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? Herst 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 to the challenge remained silent, while a slow red crept to his cheekbones. Haven't I told you by—by what I've done, he said slowly. No, what you've done is 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 it'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 illusion 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. Amhurst 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 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 honor clouded, above all, ah, this was what rung 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 two rash a hand. The thought stung her to passionate activity of mind, made her resolve to risk anything, dare anything, before she involved him further 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. Are you 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 to day? Not to day, 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. Goodbye, she said, letting her hand slip softly along his coat sleeve as he turned to the door. CHAPTER XXXIII At half past six that afternoon, just as Amherst, on his return from the mills, put the key into his door at Haniford, Mrs. Ansel 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 Sicily? He struck both hands upward with a comprehensive gesture. Sicily, 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. Ansel looked at him with growing perturbation. Saved Bessie's life? But how? By home. She might have been allowed to live, I mean, to recover. She was killed, Maria. That woman killed her. Mrs. Ansel, 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 a stick and leaning his weight heavily on it. A white, disheveled old man. I wonder why you ask. Just to spare me? Their eyes met in a piercing exchange of question and answer, and Mrs. Ansel 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 redened eyelids. Mrs. Ansel 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 to-day? Mrs. Ansel paused in a painful effort to readjust her thoughts. But why did she tell you? That's simple enough to prevent Wyance 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, 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. Ansel 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? We found that her accomplice meant to speak, and rushed to town to forestall him. Mrs. Ansel reflected. But why, with his place at St. Christopher's secured, did Dr. Wyatt 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. Langehope 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. Langehope'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 sort of scientific experiment. She forced on me the hideous details. Mrs. Ansel waited a moment. Well, may it not be true? Wyatt's version is different. He says Bessie 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. She says the chance was too remote, the pain too bad. That's her cue, naturally. Mrs. Ansel, 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. Ansel 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, 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 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 Sicily's stepfather, 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. Ansel 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 am tied hand and foot, as you see, by Sicily's interests, and I am bound to say she exonerated him completely, completely. Mrs. Ansel 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. Ansel 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 rung 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 of facing herself somehow. Of course, on 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. Ansel 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? He 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 it striking me too. Mrs. Ansel breathed a shuddering sigh. Oh! I understand your feeling as you do. I am 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. Ansel looked up. It doesn't dwell anywhere as yet. But my poor Henry, she murmured, rising to move toward him, and softly lain 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. Seeing 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 ref 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. Lang Hope'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. Lang Hope'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's intention of laying the facts before Mr. Langhope. His few broken words lit up the furthest 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 one 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 Bessie, 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. Lang Hope 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 overemphasizing the momentary estrangement between them, there would be a bitter joy in such payment. Her hour with Mr. Lang Hope 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 obliquy. She could see that, for a dozen reasons, Mr. Lang Hope, 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 Hannaford, explain to her husband that she had felt impelled to tell her own story to Mr. Lang Hope, 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 depth of her own conscience. End of Book 4, Chapter 38 Book 4, Chapter 39 of the Fruit of the Tree. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Fruit of the Tree by Edith Wharton. Book 4, Chapter 39. In 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 labored 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 intangible 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 Bessie. 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 as 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 ascent, 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 Lindbrook 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 through an intolerable doubt on her whole course. He stayed late at the mills, finding one pretext after another for delaying his return to Hannaford, 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 Am Hearst 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 to-morrow, 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 plainte evolutions. The quiet tone in which she stated her purpose matched the firmness and courage of the act, and for a moment Am Hearst 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 skepticism, 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 whether 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 Hannaford, to which she was returning, would look at her with the same alien face. Square on earth at that moment was a door which would open to her like the door of a 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 Hannaford 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 Amhurst Wood 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 26th Street where she had sat with Amhurst on the day of his flight from Lindbrook. 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 Bessie. 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 endeavors, yet so faithfully does each weak upward impulse reach back a hand to the next. One'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 illusions, above all in her recovered composure. She had the demeanor 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 defense. 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 shan't rest till I've gone to the bottom of it. Till then you must understand, he summed up with the decision. I feel myself only on sufferance here at Westmore. Yes, I understand, she assented, and as he bent over to kiss her for good-bye, a tenuous impenetrable barrier seemed to lie between their lips. It was Justine's turn to await with a passionate anxiety her husband's homecoming, 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. Some hearst'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 his 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 arm 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, Sicily sent you her love. She colored 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's 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 mother's club, and the various other organizations whereby she and Amherst were trying to put some sort of social unity into the lives of the millhands. 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 Hannaford, under Bessie'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 nightfall. 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 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 Sicily's next visit to Westmore. The child's birthday fell in early June, and Amherst, some months previously, had asked that she would be permitted to spend it at Hannaford, in 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 Sicily's anniversaries with some significant moment in the annals of the mill colony, and struck by the happy suggestion he had it once applied himself to hastening on the work at Hopewood. The eagerness of both Amherst and Justine that Sicily 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 Sicily'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 Sicily would not be allowed to come to Hannaford 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 Sicily's birthday as a determining date in their lives. He spoke confidently, and as a matter, of course, of Mr. Langhope's bringing his granddaughter 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 steps 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 illusion 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 needle-work which served at once as a pretext for lowered eyes and as a means of disguising her fixed preoccupation. Have you worked out a plan, he asked, laying down his book? It occurred to me that it would be rather a good idea if we began with a sort of festivity for the kids at the day-nursary. You could take Cicely there early, and I could bring out Mr. Langhope after luncheon. The whole performance would probably tire him too much. Justine listened with suspended thread. Yes, that seems a good plan. Will you see about the details, then? You know it's only a week off. Yes, I know. She hesitated, and then took the spring. I ought to tell you, John, that I—I think I may not be here. He raised his head abruptly, and she saw the blood mount under his fair skin. Not be here, he exclaimed. She met his look as steadily as she could. I think of going away for a while. Going away? Where? What is the matter? Are you not well? There was her pretext. He had found it for her. Why should she not simply plead ill health? Or she would find a way of elaborating the details and making them plausible. But suddenly, as she was about to speak, there came to her the feeling which, up to one fatal moment in their lives, had always ruled their intercourse, the feeling that there must be truth and absolute truth between them. Absolute indeed, it could never be again, since he must never know of the condition exacted by Mr. Langhope. But that, at the moment, seemed almost a secondary motive compared to the deeper influences that were inexorably forcing them apart. At any rate, she would trump up no trivial excuse for the step she had resolved on. There should be truth, if not the whole truth, in this last decisive hour between them. Yes, I am quite well—at least my body, as she said quietly—but I am tired, perhaps. My mind has been going round too long in the same circle. She paused for a brief space, then, raising her head and looking him straight in the eyes. Has it not been so with you, she asked. The question seemed to startle Amherst. He rose from his chair and took a few steps toward the hearth where a small fire was crumbling into embers. He turned his back to it, resting an arm on the mantle-shelf, then he said in a somewhat unsteady tone. I thought we had agreed not to speak of all that again. Justine shook her head with a fugitive half-smile. I made no such agreement. And besides, what is the use, when we can always hear each other's thoughts speak, and they speak of nothing else? Amherst's brows darkened. It is not so with mine, he began, but she raised her hand with a silencing gesture. I know you have tried your best that it should not be so, and perhaps you have succeeded better than I. But I am tired, horribly tired, I want to get away from everything. She saw a look of pain in his eyes. He continued to lean against the mantle-shelf, his head slightly lowered, his unseeing gaze fixed on a remote scroll in the pattern of the carpet. Then he said, in a low tone, I can only repeat again what I have said before, that I understand why you did what you did. Thank you, she answered in the same tone. There was another pause, for she could not trust herself to go on speaking, and presently he asked, with a tinge of bitterness in his voice, That does not satisfy you? She hesitated. It satisfies me as much as it does you, and no more, she replied at length. He looked up hastily. What do you mean? Just what I say, we can neither of us go on living on that understanding just at present. She rose as she spoke and crossed over to the hearth. I want to go back to my nursing, go out to Michigan, to a town where I spent a few months the year before I came to Hannaford. I have friends there and can get work easily, and you can tell people that I was ill and needed a change. It had been easier to say than she had imagined, and her voice held its clear note till the end. But when she had ceased, the whole room began to reverberate with her words, and through the clashing they made in her brain, she felt a sudden uncontrollable longing that they should provoke in him a cry of protest, of resistance. Oh, if he refused to let her go, if he caught her to him and defied the world to part them, what then of her pledged to Mr. Langhope? What then of her resolve to pay the penalty alone? In the space of a heartbeat she knew that peril, that longed-for peril was passed. Her husband had remained silent. He neither moved toward her nor looked at her, and she felt in every slackening nerve that in the end he would let her go. CHAPTER XIV Mr. Langhope, tossing down a note on Mrs. Ansel's drawing-room table, commanded imperiously, Read that! She set aside her teacup and looked up, not at the note but into his face which was crossed by one of the waves of heat and tremulousness that she was beginning to fear for him. Mr. Langhope had changed greatly in the last three months, and as he stood there in the clear light of the June afternoon it came to her that he had at last suffered the sudden collapse which is the penalty of youth preserved beyond its time. What is it, she asked, still watching him as she put out her hand for the letter. Amherst's writes to remind me of my promise to take Sicily to Haniford next week for her birthday. Well, it was a promise, wasn't it? She rejoined, running her eyes over the page. A promise, yes, but made before. Read the note. You'll see there's no reference to his wife. For all I know she'll be there to receive us. But that was a promise, too. That neither Sicily nor I should ever set eyes on her? Yes. But why should she keep it? I was a fool that day. She fooled me as she's fooled us all. But you saw through it from the beginning. You said at once that she'd never leave him. Mrs. Ansel reflected. I said that before I knew all the circumstances. Now I think differently. You think she still means to go? She handed the letter back to him. I think this is to tell you so. This, he groped for his glasses, dubiously scanning the letter again. Yes, and what's more, if you refuse to go she'll have every right to break her side of the agreement. Mr. Langhope sank into a chair, steadying himself painfully with his stick. Upon my soul I sometimes think you're on her side, he ejaculated. No, but I like fair play, she returned, measuring his tea carefully into his favourite little porcelain teapot. Fair play. She's offering to do her part. It's for you to do yours now, to take Sicily to Hannaford. If I find her there I never cross Amherst's threshold again. Mrs. Ansel, without answering, rose and put his teacup on the slender-legged table at his elbow. Then, before returning to her seat, she found the enameled match-box and lay it by the cup. It was becoming difficult for Mr. Langhope to guide his movements about her small and cumbered room, and he had always liked being waited on. Mrs. Ansel's prognostication proved correct. When Mr. Langhope and Sicily arrived at Hannaford, they found Amherst alone to receive them. He explained briefly that his wife had been unwell and had gone to seek rest and change at the house of an old friend in the West. Mr. Langhope expressed a decent amount of regret, and the subject was dropped as if by common consent. Sicily, however, was not so easily silenced. Poor Bessie's uncertain fits of tenderness had produced more bewilderment than pleasure in her sober-minded child, but the little girl's feelings and perceptions had developed rapidly in the equable atmosphere of her stepmother's affection. Sicily had reached the age when children put their questions with as much ingenuity as persistence, and both Mr. Langhope and Amherst longed for Mrs. Ansel's aid in parrying her incessant interrogations as to the cause and length of Justine's absence, what she had said before going, and what promise she had made about coming back. But Mrs. Ansel had not come to Hannaford. Though it had become a matter of habit to include her in the family pilgrimages to the mills, she had firmly maintained the plea of more urgent engagements, and the two men, with only Sicily between them, had spent the long days and longer evenings in unaccustomed and unmitigated propinquity. Mr. Langhope, before leaving, fought it proper to touch tentatively on his promise of giving Sicily to Amherst for the summer, but to his surprise, the latter, after a moment of hesitation, replied that he should probably go to Europe for two or three months. To Europe alone escaped from Mr. Langhope before he had time to weigh his words. Amherst frowned slightly. I have been made a delegate to the Baron Conference on the housing of factory operatives he set at length, without making a direct reply to the question, and if there is nothing to keep me at Westmore I shall probably go out in July. He waited a moment and then added, my wife has decided to spend the summer in Michigan. Mr. Langhope's answer was a vague murmur of assent, and Amherst turned the talk to other matters. Mr. Langhope returned to town with distinct views on the situation at Hannaford. Poor devil, I'm sorry for him. He can hardly speak of her. He broke out at once to Mrs. Ansel in the course of their first confidential hour together. Because he cares too much, he's too unhappy. Because he loathes her, Mr. Langhope brought out with emphasis. Mrs. Ansel drew a deep sigh which made him adacusingly. I believe you're actually sorry. Sorry, she raced her eyebrows with a little smile. Would one not always be sorry to know there's a little less love and a little more hate in the world? You'll be asking me not to hate her next. She still continued to smile on him. It's the haters, not the hated I'm sorry for, she said at length, and he flung back impatiently. Oh, don't let's talk of her. I sometimes feel she takes up more place in our lives than when she was with us. Just went to the Baron Conference in July and spent six weeks afterward in rapid visits to various industrial centres and model factory villages. During his previous European pilgrimages his interest had by no means been restricted to sociological questions. The appeal of an old civilisation, reaching him through its innumerable forms of tradition and beauty, had roused that side of his imagination which his work at home left untouched. But upon his present state of deep moral commotion the spells of art and history were powerless to work. The foundations of his life had been shaken and the fair exterior of the world was as vacant as a maniac's face. He could only take refuge in his special task barricading himself against every expression of beauty and poetry as so many poignant reminders of a phase of life that he was vainly trying to cast off and forget. Even his work had been embittered to him, thrust out of its place in the ordered scheme of things. It had cost him a hard struggle to hold fast to his main purpose, to convince himself that his real duty lay, not in renouncing the Westmore money and its obligations, but in carrying out his projected task as if nothing had occurred to affect his personal relation to it. The mere fact that such a renunciation would have been a deliberate moral suicide, a severing once for all of every artery of action, made it take on at first the semblance of an obligation, a sort of higher duty to the abstract conception of what he owed himself. But Justine had not aired in her forecast. Once she had passed out of his life it was easier for him to return to a dispassionate view of his situation, to see and boldly confess to himself that he saw the still higher duty of sticking to his task instead of sacrificing it to any ideal of personal disinterestedness. It was this gradual process of adjustment that saved him from the desolating skepticism which falls on the active man when the sources of his activity are tainted. Justine accepted his fate, having consented to see himself merely the necessary agent of a good to be done. He could escape from self-questioning only by shedding himself in the practical exigencies of his work, closing his eyes and his thoughts to everything which had formerly related it to a wider world, had given meaning and beauty to life as a whole. The return from Europe and the taking up of the daily routine at Hannaford were the most difficult phases in this process of moral adaptation. Justine's departure had at first brought relief. He had been too sincere with himself to oppose her wish to leave Hannaford for a time, since he believed that, for her as well as for himself, a temporary separation would be less painful than a continuance of their actual relation. But as the weeks passed into months he found he was no nearer to a clear view of his own case. The future was still dark and enigmatic. Justine's desire to leave him had revived his unformulated distrust of her. What could it mean but there were thoughts within her which could not be at rest in his presence? He had given her every proof of his wish to forget the past, and Mr. Langhope had behaved with unequaled magnanimity. Yet Justine's unhappiness was evident. She could not conceal her longing to escape from the conditions her act had created. Was it because, in reality, she was conscious of other motives than the one she had acknowledged? She had insisted, almost unfeelingly as it might have seemed, on the abstract rightness of what she had done, on the fact that, ideally speaking, her act could not be made less right, less justifiable by the special accidental consequences that had flowed from it. Because these consequences had caught her in a web of tragic fatality she would not be guilty of the weakness of tracing back the disaster to any intrinsic error in her original motive. Why then, if this was her real, her proud attitude toward the past and since those about her believed in her sincerity and accepted her justification as valid from her point of view, if not from theirs, why had she not been able to maintain her posture to carry on life on the terms she had exacted from others? A special circumstance contributed to this feeling of distrust, the fact, namely, that Justine, a week after her departure from Hannaford, had written to say that she could not, from that moment till her return, consent to accept any money from Amherst. As her manner was, she put her reasons clearly and soberly without evasion or ambiguity. Since you and I, she wrote, have always agreed in regarding the Westmore money as a kind of wage for our services at the mills, I cannot be satisfied to go on drawing that wage while I am unable to do any work in return. I am sure you must feel as I do about this, and you need have no anxiety as to the practical side of the question, since I have enough to live on in some savings from my hospital days, which were invested for me two years ago by Harry Dressel, and are beginning to bring in a small return. This being the case, I feel I can afford to interpret in any way I choose the terms of the bargain between myself and Westmore. On reading this, Amherst's mind had gone through the strange, dual process which now marked all his judgments of his wife. At first he had fancied he understood her, and had felt that he should have done as she did, then the usual reaction of distrust set in, and he asked himself why she, who had so little of the conventional attitude toward money, should now develop this unexpected susceptibility. And so the old question presented itself in another shape. If she had nothing to reproach herself for, why was it intolerable to her to live on Bessie's money? The fact that she was doing no actual service at Westmore did not account for her scruples. She would have been the last person to think that a sixth servant should be docked of his pay. Her reluctance could come only from that hidden cause of compunction which had prompted her departure, and which now forced her to sever even the merely material links between herself and her past. Amherst, on his return to Hannaford, had tried to find in these considerations a reason for his deep unrest. It was his wife's course which still cast a torturing doubt on what he had braced his will to accept and put behind him. And he now told himself that the perpetual galling sense of her absence was due to this uneasy consciousness of what it meant, of the dark secrets it enveloped and held back from him. In actual truth every particle of his being missed her. He lacked her at every turn. She had been at once the partner of his task, and the pie blew into which he escaped from it. The vivifying thought which gave meaning to the life he had chosen yet never let him forget that there was a larger, richer life outside to which he was rooted by deeper and more intrinsic things than any abstract ideal of altruism. His love had preserved his identity, saved him from shrinking into the mere nameless unit which the social enthusiast is in danger of becoming unless the humanitarian passion is balanced and a little overweight by a merely human one. And now this equilibrium was lost forever, and his deepest pain lay in realizing that he could not regain it, even by casting off Westmore and choosing the narrower but richer individual existence that her love might once have offered. His life was in truth one indivisible organism, not two halves artificially united. Both and other self were ingrown from the roots. Whichever portion fate restricted him to would be but a mutilated half-life fragment of the whole. Happily for him chance made this crisis of his life coincide with a strike at Westmore. Soon after his return to Hannaford he found himself compelled to grapple with the hardest problem of his industrial career, and he was carried through the ensuing three months on that tide of swift obligatory action that sweeps the shipwrecked spirit over so many sunken reefs of fear and despair. The knowledge that he was better able to deal with the question than anyone who might conceivably have taken his place, this conviction, which was presently confirmed by the peaceable adjustment of the strike, helped to make the sense of his immediate usefulness out balance that other, disintegrating doubt as to the final value of such efforts. And so he tried to settle down into a kind of mechanical altruism in which the reflexes of habit should take the place of that daily renewal of faith and enthusiasm which had been fed from the springs of his own joy. The autumn came and passed into winter, and after Mr. Lang Hope's re-establishment in town Amherst began to resume his usual visits to his step-daughter. His natural affection for the little girl had been deepened by the unforeseen manner in which her fate had been entrusted to him. The thought of Bessie softened to compunction by the discovery that her love had persisted under their apparently hopeless estrangement. This feeling, intensified to the verge of morbidness by the circumstances attending her death, now sought expression in a passionate devotion to her child. Accident had, in short, created between Bessie and himself a retrospective sympathy which the resumption of life together would have dispelled in a week, one of the exhalations from the past that depressed the vitality of those who lingered too near the grave of dead experiences. Since Justine's departure Amherst had felt himself still more drawn to Sicily, but his relation to the child was complicated by the fact that she would not be satisfied as to the cause of her stepmother's absence. Whenever Amherst came to town, her first question was for Justine, and her memory had the precocious persistence sometimes developed in children too early deprived of their natural atmosphere of affection. Sicily had always been petted and adored at odd times and by diverse people, but some instinct seemed to tell her that of all the tenderness bestowed on her, Justine's most resembled the all pervading motherly element in which the child's heart expands without ever being conscious of its needs. If it had been embarrassing to evade Sicily's questions in June, it became doubly so as the months passed, and the pretext of Justine's ill health grew more and more difficult to sustain. And in the following March Amherst was suddenly called from Hannaford by the news that the little girl herself was ill. This complications had developed from a protracted case of scarlet fever, and for two weeks the child's fate was uncertain. Then she began to recover, and in the joy of seeing life come back to her Mr. Langhope and Amherst felt as though they must not only gratify every wish she expressed, but try to guess at those they saw floating below the surface of her clear, vague eyes. It was noticeable to Mrs. Ansel, if not to the others, that one of these unexpressed wishes was the desire to see her stepmother. Sicily no longer asked for Justine, but something in her silence, or in the gesture with which she gently put from her other offers of diversion and companionship suddenly struck Mrs. Ansel as more poignant than speech. What is it the child wants, she asked the governess, in the course of one of their whispered consultations, and the governess after a moment's hesitation, replied. She said something about a letter she wrote to Mrs. Amherst just before she was taken ill, about having had no answer, I think. Ah, she writes to Mrs. Amherst, does she? The governess, evidently aware that she trod on delicate ground, tried at once to defend herself and her pupil. It was my fault, perhaps, I suggested once that her little compositions should take the form of letters. It usually interests a child more, and she asked if they might be written to Mrs. Amherst. Your fault! Why should not the child write to her stepmother Mrs. Ansel rejoined with a studied surprise, and on the other's murmuring? Of course, of course, she added haughtily, I trust the letters were sent, the governess floundered. I couldn't say, but perhaps the nurse. That evening Sicily was less well, there was a slight return of fever, and the doctor, hastily summoned, hinted at the possibility of too much excitement in the sick-room. Excitement? There's been no excitement, Mr. Langhope protested, quivering with a sudden renewal of fear. No, the child seemed nervous, uneasy. It's hard to say why, because she is unusually reserved for her age. The medical man took his departure, and Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansel faced each other in the disarray produced by a call to arms, when all has seemed at peace. I shall lose her. I shall lose her the grandfather broke out, sinking into his chair with a groan. Mrs. Ansel, gathering up her furs for departure, turned on him abruptly from the threshold. It's stupid what you're doing, stupid, she exclaimed with unwanted vehemence. He raised his head with a startled look. What do you mean, what I'm doing? The child misses Justine. You ought to send for her. Mr. Langhope's hands dropped to the arms of his chair, and he straightened himself up with the pale flash of indignation. You've had moments lately. I've had moments, yes, and so have you, when the child came back to us, and we stood there and wondered how we could keep her, tie her fast, and in those moments I saw, saw what she wanted, and so did you. Mr. Langhope turned away his head. You're a sentimentalist, he flung scornfully back. Oh, call me any bad names you please. I won't send for that woman. No. She fastened her furs slowly, with the gentle deliberate movements that no emotion ever hastened or disturbed. Why do you say no? He challenged her. To make you contradict me, perhaps, she ventured after looking at him again. Ah! He shifted his position, one elbow supporting his bowed head, his eyes fixed on the ground. Presently he brought out. Could one ask her to come and see the child, and go away again? For good? To break the compact at your pleasure, and enter into it again for the same reason? No. No. I see. He paused, and then looked up at her suddenly. But what if Amherst won't have her back himself? Shall I ask him? I tell you he can't bear to hear her name. But he doesn't know why she has left him. Mr. Langhope gathered his brows in a frown. Why, what on earth? What possible difference would that make? Mrs. Ansel from the doorway shed a pitying glance on him. Ah! If you don't see, she murmured. He sank back into his seat with a groan. Good heavens, Maria, how you torture me! I see enough as it is. I see too much of the cursed business. She paused again, and then slowly moved a step or two nearer, laying her hand on his shoulder. There's one thing you've never seen yet, Henry. What Bessie herself would do now, for the child if she could. He sat motionless under her light touch, his eyes on hers, till their inmost thoughts felt for and found each other, as they still sometimes could, through the fog of years and selfishness and worldly habit. Then he dropped his face into his hands, hiding it from her with the instinctive shrinking of an aged grief.