WHEN Amherst woke, the next morning, in the hotel to which he had gone up from Lynbrook, he was oppressed by the sense that the hardest step he had to take still lay before him. It had been almost easy to decide that the moment of separation had come, for circumstances seemed to have closed every other issue from his unhappy situation; but how tell his wife of his decision? Amherst, to whom action was the first necessity of being, became a weak procrastinator when he was confronted by the need of writing instead of speaking.
To account for his abrupt departure from Lynbrook he had left word that he was called to town on business; but, since he did not mean to return, some farther explanation was now necessary, and he was paralyzed by the difficulty of writing. He had already telegraphed to his friend that he would be at the mills the next day; but the southern express did not leave till the afternoon, and he still had several hours in which to consider what he should say to his wife. To postpone the dreaded task, he invented the pretext of some business to be despatched, and taking the Subway to Wall Street consumed the morning in futile activities. But since the renunciation of his work at Westmore he had no active concern with the financial world, and by twelve o'clock he had exhausted his imaginary affairs and was journeying up town again. He left the train at Union Square, and walked along Fourth Avenue, now definitely resolved to go back to the hotel and write his letter before lunching.
At Twenty-sixth Street he had struck into Madison Avenue, and was striding onward with the fixed eye and aimless haste of the man who has empty hours to fill, when a hansom drew up ahead of him and Justine Brent sprang out. She was trimly dressed, as if for travel, with a small bag in her hand; but at sight of him she paused with a cry of pleasure.
Oh, Mr. Amherst, I'm so glad! I was afraid I might not see you for goodbye.
For goodbye? Amherst paused, embarrassed. How had she guessed that he did not mean to return to Lynbrook?
You know, she reminded him, "I'm going to some friends near Philadelphia for ten days"--and he remembered confusedly that a long time ago--probably yesterday morning--he had heard her speak of her projected visit.
I had no idea, she continued, "that you were coming up to town yesterday, or I should have tried to see you before you left. I wanted to ask you to send me a line if Bessy needs me--I'll come back at once if she does." Amherst continued to listen blankly, as if making a painful effort to regain some consciousness of what was being said to him, and she went on: "She seemed so nervous and poorly yesterday evening that I was sorry I had decided to go----"
Her intent gaze reminded him that the emotions of the last twenty-four hours must still be visible in his face; and the thought of what she might detect helped to restore his self-possession. "You must not think of giving up your visit," he began hurriedly--he had meant to add "on account of Bessy," but he found himself unable to utter his wife's name.
Justine was still looking at him. "Oh, I'm sure everything will be all right," she rejoined. "You go back this afternoon, I suppose? I've left you a little note, with my address, and I want you to promise----"
She paused, for Amherst had made a motion as though to interrupt her. The old confused sense that there must always be truth between them was struggling in him with the strong restraints of habit and character; and suddenly, before he was conscious of having decided to speak, he heard himself say: "I ought to tell you that I am not going back."
Not going back? A flash of apprehension crossed Justine's face. "Not till tomorrow, you mean?" she added, recovering herself.
Amherst hesitated, glancing vaguely up and down the street. At that noonday hour it was nearly deserted, and Justine's driver dozed on his perch above the hansom. They could speak almost as openly as if they had been in one of the wood-paths at Lynbrook.
Nor tomorrow, Amherst said in a low voice. There was another pause before he added: "It may be some time before--" He broke off, and then continued with an effort: "The fact is, I am thinking of going back to my old work."
She caught him up with an exclamation of surprise and sympathy. "Your old work? You mean at----"
She was checked by the quick contraction of pain in his face. "Not that! I mean that I'm thinking of taking a new job--as manager of a Georgia mill.... It's the only thing I know how to do, and I've got to do something--" He forced a laugh. "The habit of work is incurable!"
Justine's face had grown as grave as his. She hesitated a moment, looking down the street toward the angle of Madison Square, which was visible from the corner where they stood.
Will you walk back to the square with me? Then we can sit down a moment.
She began to move as she spoke, and he walked beside her in silence till they had gained the seat she pointed out. Her hansom trailed after them, drawing up at the corner.
As Amherst sat down beside her, Justine turned to him with an air of quiet resolution. "Mr. Amherst--will you let me ask you something? Is this a sudden decision?"
Yes. I decided yesterday.
And Bessy----?
His glance dropped for the first time, but Justine pressed her point. "Bessy approves?"
She--she will, I think--when she knows----
When she knows? Her emotion sprang into her face. "When she knows? Then she does not--yet?"
No. The offer came suddenly. I must go at once.
Without seeing her? She cut him short with a quick commanding gesture. "Mr. Amherst, you can't do this--you won't do it! You will not go away without seeing Bessy!" she said.
Her eyes sought his and drew them upward, constraining them to meet the full beam of her rebuking gaze.
I must do what seems best under the circumstances, he answered hesitatingly. "She will hear from me, of course; I shall write today--and later----"
Not later! _Now_--you will go back now to Lynbrook! Such things can't be told in writing--if they must be said at all, they must be spoken. Don't tell me that I don't understand--or that I'm meddling in what doesn't concern me. I don't care a fig for that! I've always meddled in what didn't concern me--I always shall, I suppose, till I die! And I understand enough to know that Bessy is very unhappy--and that you're the wiser and stronger of the two. I know what it's been to you to give up your work--to feel yourself useless, she interrupted herself, with softening eyes, "and I know how you've tried...I've watched you...but Bessy has tried too; and even if you've both failed--if you've come to the end of your resources--it's for you to face the fact, and help her face it--not to run away from it like this!"
Amherst sat silent under the assault of her eloquence. He was conscious of no instinctive resentment, no sense that she was, as she confessed, meddling in matters which did not concern her. His ebbing spirit was revived by the shock of an ardour like his own. She had not shrunk from calling him a coward--and it did him good to hear her call him so! Her words put life back into its true perspective, restored their meaning to obsolete terms: to truth and manliness and courage. He had lived so long among equivocations that he had forgotten how to look a fact in the face; but here was a woman who judged life by his own standards--and by those standards she had found him wanting!
Still, he could not forget the last bitter hours, or change his opinion as to the futility of attempting to remain at Lynbrook. He felt as strongly as ever the need of moral and mental liberation--the right to begin life again on his own terms. But Justine Brent had made him see that his first step toward self-assertion had been the inconsistent one of trying to evade its results.
You are right--I will go back, he said.
She thanked him with her eyes, as she had thanked him on the terrace at Lynbrook, on the autumn evening which had witnessed their first broken exchange of confidences; and he was struck once more with the change that feeling produced in her. Emotions flashed across her face like the sweep of sun-rent clouds over a quiet landscape, bringing out the gleam of hidden waters, the fervour of smouldering colours, all the subtle delicacies of modelling that are lost under the light of an open sky. And it was extraordinary how she could infuse into a principle the warmth and colour of a passion! If conduct, to most people, seemed a cold matter of social prudence or inherited habit, to her it was always the newly-discovered question of her own relation to life--as most women see the great issues only through their own wants and prejudices, so she seemed always to see her personal desires in the light of the larger claims.
But I don't think, Amherst went on, "that anything can be said to convince me that I ought to alter my decision. These months of idleness have shown me that I'm one of the members of society who are a danger to the community if their noses are not kept to the grindstone----"
Justine lowered her eyes musingly, and he saw she was undergoing the reaction of constraint which always followed on her bursts of unpremeditated frankness.
That is not for me to judge, she answered after a moment. "But if you decide to go away for a time--surely it ought to be in such a way that your going does not seem to cast any reflection on Bessy, or subject her to any unkind criticism."
Amherst, reddening slightly, glanced at her in surprise. "I don't think you need fear that--I shall be the only one criticized," he said drily.
Are you sure--if you take such a position as you spoke of? So few people understand the love of hard work for its own sake. They will say that your quarrel with your wife has driven you to support yourself--and that will be cruel to Bessy.
Amherst shrugged his shoulders. "They'll be more likely to say I tried to play the gentleman and failed, and wasn't happy till I got back to my own place in life--which is true enough," he added with a touch of irony.
They may say that too; but they will make Bessy suffer first--and it will be your fault if she is humiliated in that way. If you decide to take up your factory work for a time, can't you do so without--without accepting a salary? Oh, you see I stick at nothing, she broke in upon herself with a laugh, "and Bessy has said things which make me see that she would suffer horribly if--if you put such a slight on her." He remained silent, and she went on urgently: "From Bessy's standpoint it would mean a decisive break--the repudiating of your whole past. And it is a question on which you can afford to be generous, because I know...I think...it's less important in your eyes than hers...."
Amherst glanced at her quickly. "That particular form of indebtedness, you mean?"
She smiled. "The easiest to cancel, and therefore the least galling; isn't that the way you regard it?"
I used to--yes; but-- He was about to add: "No one at Lynbrook does," but the flash of intelligence in her eyes restrained him, while at the same time it seemed to answer: "There's my point! To see their limitation is to allow for it, since every enlightenment brings a corresponding obligation."
She made no attempt to put into words the argument her look conveyed, but rose from her seat with a rapid glance at her watch.
And now I must go, or I shall miss my train. She held out her hand, and as Amherst's met it, he said in a low tone, as if in reply to her unspoken appeal: "I shall remember all you have said."
* * * * *
It was a new experience for Amherst to be acting under the pressure of another will; but during his return journey to Lynbrook that afternoon it was pure relief to surrender himself to this pressure, and the surrender brought not a sense of weakness but of recovered energy. It was not in his nature to analyze his motives, or spend his strength in weighing closely balanced alternatives of conduct; and though, during the last purposeless months, he had grown to brood over every spring of action in himself and others, this tendency disappeared at once in contact with the deed to be done. It was as though a tributary stream, gathering its crystal speed among the hills, had been suddenly poured into the stagnant waters of his will; and he saw now how thick and turbid those waters had become--how full of the slime-bred life that chokes the springs of courage.
His whole desire now was to be generous to his wife: to bear the full brunt of whatever pain their parting brought. Justine had said that Bessy seemed nervous and unhappy: it was clear, therefore, that she also had suffered from the wounds they had dealt each other, though she kept her unmoved front to the last. Poor child! Perhaps that insensible exterior was the only way she knew of expressing courage! It seemed to Amherst that all means of manifesting the finer impulses must slowly wither in the Lynbrook air. As he approached his destination, his thoughts of her were all pitiful: nothing remained of the personal resentment which had debased their parting. He had telephoned from town to announce the hour of his return, and when he emerged from the station he half-expected to find her seated in the brougham whose lamps signalled him through the early dusk. It would be like her to undergo such a reaction of feeling, and to express it, not in words, but by taking up their relation as if there had been no break in it. He had once condemned this facility of renewal as a sign of lightness, a result of that continual evasion of serious issues which made the life of Bessy's world a thin crust of custom above a void of thought. But he now saw that, if she was the product of her environment, that constituted but another claim on his charity, and made the more precious any impulses of natural feeling that had survived the unifying pressure of her life. As he approached the brougham, he murmured mentally: "What if I were to try once more?"
Bessy had not come to meet him; but he said to himself that he should find her alone at the house, and that he would make his confession at once. As the carriage passed between the lights on the tall stone gate-posts, and rolled through the bare shrubberies of the avenue, he felt a momentary tightening of the heart--a sense of stepping back into the trap from which he had just wrenched himself free--a premonition of the way in which the smooth systematized routine of his wife's existence might draw him back into its revolutions as he had once seen a careless factory hand seized and dragged into a flying belt....
But it was only for a moment; then his thoughts reverted to Bessy. It was she who was to be considered--this time he must be strong enough for both.
The butler met him on the threshold, flanked by the usual array of footmen; and as he saw his portmanteau ceremoniously passed from hand to hand, Amherst once more felt the steel of the springe on his neck.
Is Mrs. Amherst in the drawing-room, Knowles? he asked.
No, sir, said Knowles, who had too high a sense of fitness to volunteer any information beyond the immediate fact required of him.
She has gone up to her sitting-room, then? Amherst continued, turning toward the broad sweep of the stairway.
No, sir, said the butler slowly; "Mrs. Amherst has gone away."
Gone away? Amherst stopped short, staring blankly at the man's smooth official mask.
This afternoon, sir; to Mapleside.
To Mapleside?
Yes, sir, by motor--to stay with Mrs. Carbury.
There was a moment's silence. It had all happened so quickly that Amherst, with the dual vision which comes at such moments, noticed that the third footman--or was it the fourth?--was just passing his portmanteau on to a shirt-sleeved arm behind the door which led to the servant's wing....
He roused himself to look at the tall clock. It was just six. He had telephoned from town at two.
At what time did Mrs. Amherst leave?
The butler meditated. "Sharp at four, sir. The maid took the three-forty with the luggage."
With the luggage! So it was not a mere one-night visit. The blood rose slowly to Amherst's face. The footmen had disappeared, but presently the door at the back of the hall reopened, and one of them came out, carrying an elaborately-appointed tea-tray toward the smoking-room. The routine of the house was going on as if nothing had happened.... The butler looked at Amherst with respectful--too respectful--interrogation, and he was suddenly conscious that he was standing motionless in the middle of the hall, with one last intolerable question on his lips.
Well--it had to be spoken! "Did Mrs. Amherst receive my telephone message?"
Yes, sir. I gave it to her myself.
It occurred confusedly to Amherst that a well-bred man--as Lynbrook understood the phrase--would, at this point, have made some tardy feint of being in his wife's confidence, of having, on second thoughts, no reason to be surprised at her departure. It was humiliating, he supposed, to be thus laying bare his discomfiture to his dependents--he could see that even Knowles was affected by the manifest impropriety of the situation--but no pretext presented itself to his mind, and after another interval of silence he turned slowly toward the door of the smoking-room.
My letters are here, I suppose? he paused on the threshold to enquire; and on the butler's answering in the affirmative, he said to himself, with a last effort to suspend his judgment: "She has left a line--there will be some explanation----"
But there was nothing--neither word nor message; nothing but the reverberating retort of her departure in the face of his return--her flight to Blanche Carbury as the final answer to his final appeal.
JUSTINE was coming back to Lynbrook. She had been, after all, unable to stay out the ten days of her visit: the undefinable sense of being needed, so often the determining motive of her actions, drew her back to Long Island at the end of the week. She had received no word from Amherst or Bessy; only Cicely had told her, in a big round hand, that mother had been away three days, and that it had been very lonely, and that the housekeeper's cat had kittens, and she was to have one; and were kittens christened, or how did they get their names?--because she wanted to call hers Justine; and she had found in her book a bird like the one father had shown them in the swamp; and they were not alone now, because the Telfers were there, and they had all been out sleighing; but it would be much nicer when Justine came back....
It was as difficult to extract any sequence of facts from Cicely's letter as from an early chronicle. She made no reference to Amherst's return, which was odd, since she was fond of her step-father, yet not significant, since the fact of his arrival might have been crowded out by the birth of the kittens, or some incident equally prominent in her perspectiveless grouping of events; nor did she name the date of her mother's departure, so that Justine could not guess whether it had been contingent on Amherst's return, or wholly unconnected with it. What puzzled her most was Bessy's own silence--yet that too, in a sense, was reassuring, for Bessy thought of others chiefly when it was painful to think of herself, and her not writing implied that she had felt no present need of her friend's sympathy.
Justine did not expect to find Amherst at Lynbrook. She had felt convinced, when they parted, that he would persist in his plan of going south; and the fact that the Telfer girls were again in possession made it seem probable that he had already left. Under the circumstances, Justine thought the separation advisable; but she was eager to be assured that it had been effected amicably, and without open affront to Bessy's pride.
She arrived on a Saturday afternoon, and when she entered the house the sound of voices from the drawing-room, and the prevailing sense of bustle and movement amid which her own coming was evidently an unconsidered detail, showed that the normal life of Lynbrook had resumed its course. The Telfers, as usual, had brought a lively throng in their train; and amid the bursts of merriment about the drawing-room tea-table she caught Westy Gaines's impressive accents, and the screaming laughter of Blanche Carbury....
So Blanche Carbury was back at Lynbrook! The discovery gave Justine fresh cause for conjecture. Whatever reciprocal concessions might have resulted from Amherst's return to his wife, it seemed hardly probable that they included a renewal of relations with Mrs. Carbury. Had his mission failed then--had he and Bessy parted in anger, and was Mrs. Carbury's presence at Lynbrook Bessy's retort to his assertion of independence?
In the school-room, where Justine was received with the eager outpouring of Cicely's minutest experiences, she dared not put the question that would have solved these doubts; and she left to dress for dinner without knowing whether Amherst had returned to Lynbrook. Yet in her heart she never questioned that he had done so; all her fears revolved about what had since taken place.
She saw Bessy first in the drawing-room, surrounded by her guests; and their brief embrace told her nothing, except that she had never beheld her friend more brilliant, more triumphantly in possession of recovered spirits and health.
That Amherst was absent was now made evident by Bessy's requesting Westy Gaines to lead the way to the dining-room with Mrs. Ansell, who was one of the reassembled visitors; and the only one, as Justine presently observed, not in key with the prevailing gaiety. Mrs. Ansell, usually so tinged with the colours of her environment, preserved on this occasion a grey neutrality of tone which was the only break in the general brightness. It was not in her graceful person to express anything as gross as disapproval, yet that sentiment was manifest, to the nice observer, in a delicate aloofness which made the waves of laughter fall back from her, and spread a circle of cloudy calm about her end of the table. Justine had never been greatly drawn to Mrs. Ansell. Her own adaptability was not in the least akin to the older woman's studied self-effacement; and the independence of judgment which Justine preserved in spite of her perception of divergent standpoints made her a little contemptuous of an excess of charity that seemed to have been acquired at the cost of all individual convictions. To-night for the first time she felt in Mrs. Ansell a secret sympathy with her own fears; and a sense of this tacit understanding made her examine with sudden interest the face of her unexpected ally.... After all, what did she know of Mrs. Ansell's history--of the hidden processes which had gradually subdued her own passions and desires, making of her, as it were, a mere decorative background, a connecting link between other personalities? Perhaps, for a woman alone in the world, without the power and opportunity that money gives, there was no alternative between letting one's individuality harden into a small dry nucleus of egoism, or diffuse itself thus in the interstices of other lives--and there fell upon Justine the chill thought that just such a future might await her if she missed the liberating gift of personal happiness....
* * * * *
Neither that night nor the next day had she a private word with Bessy--and it became evident, as the hours passed, that Mrs. Amherst was deliberately postponing the moment when they should find themselves alone. But the Lynbrook party was to disperse on the Monday; and Bessy, who hated early rising, and all the details of housekeeping, tapped at Justine's door late on Sunday night to ask her to speed the departing visitors.
She pleaded this necessity as an excuse for her intrusion, and the playful haste of her manner showed a nervous shrinking from any renewal of confidence; but as she leaned in the doorway, fingering the diamond chain about her neck, while one satin-tipped foot emerged restlessly from the edge of her lace gown, her face lost the bloom of animation which talk and laughter always produced in it, and she looked so pale and weary that Justine needed no better pretext for drawing her into the room.
It was not in Bessy to resist a soothing touch in her moments of nervous reaction. She sank into the chair by the fire and let her head rest wearily against the cushion which Justine slipped behind it.
Justine dropped into the low seat beside her, and laid a hand on hers. "You don't look as well as when I went away, Bessy. Are you sure you've done wisely in beginning your house-parties so soon?"
It always alarmed Bessy to be told that she was not looking her best, and she sat upright, a wave of pink rising under her sensitive skin.
I am quite well, on the contrary; but I was dying of inanition in this big empty house, and I suppose I haven't got the boredom out of my system yet!
Justine recognized the echo of Mrs. Carbury's manner.
Even if you _were_ bored, she rejoined, "the inanition was probably good for you. What does Dr. Wyant say to your breaking away from his régime?" She named Wyant purposely, knowing that Bessy had that respect for the medical verdict which is the last trace of reverence for authority in the mind of the modern woman. But Mrs. Amherst laughed with gentle malice.
Oh, I haven't seen Dr. Wyant lately. His interest in me died out the day you left.
Justine forced a laugh to hide her annoyance. She had not yet recovered from the shrinking disgust of her last scene with Wyant.
Don't be a goose, Bessy. If he hasn't come, it must be because you've told him not to--because you're afraid of letting him see that you're disobeying him.
Bessy laughed again. "My dear, I'm afraid of nothing--nothing! Not even of your big eyes when they glare at me like coals. I suppose you must have looked at poor Wyant like that to frighten him away! And yet the last time we talked of him you seemed to like him--you even hinted that it was because of him that Westy had no chance."
Justine uttered an impatient exclamation. "If neither of them existed it wouldn't affect the other's chances in the least. Their only merit is that they both enhance the charms of celibacy!"
Bessy's smile dropped, and she turned a grave glance on her friend. "Ah, most men do that--you're so clever to have found it out!"
It was Justine's turn to smile. "Oh, but I haven't--as a generalization. I mean to marry as soon as I get the chance!"
The chance----?
To meet the right man. I'm gambler enough to believe in my luck yet!
Mrs. Amherst sighed compassionately. "There _is_ no right man! As Blanche says, matrimony's as uncomfortable as a ready-made shoe. How can one and the same institution fit every individual case? And why should we all have to go lame because marriage was once invented to suit an imaginary case?"
Justine gave a slight shrug. "You talk of walking lame--how else do we all walk? It seems to me that life's the tight boot, and marriage the crutch that may help one to hobble along!" She drew Bessy's hand into hers with a caressing pressure. "When you philosophize I always know you're tired. No one who feels well stops to generalize about symptoms. If you won't let your doctor prescribe for you, your nurse is going to carry out his orders. What you want is quiet. Be reasonable and send away everybody before Mr. Amherst comes back!"
She dropped the last phrase carelessly, glancing away as she spoke; but the stiffening of the fingers in her clasp sent a little tremor through her hand.
Thanks for your advice. It would be excellent but for one thing--my husband is not coming back!
The mockery in Bessy's voice seemed to pass into her features, hardening and contracting them as frost shrivels a flower. Justine's face, on the contrary, was suddenly illuminated by compassion, as though a light had struck up into it from the cold glitter of her friend's unhappiness.
Bessy! What do you mean by not coming back?
I mean he's had the tact to see that we shall be more comfortable apart--without putting me to the unpleasant necessity of telling him so.
Again the piteous echo of Blanche Carbury's phrases! The laboured mimicry of her ideas!
Justine looked anxiously at her friend. It seemed horribly false not to mention her own talk with Amherst, yet she felt it wiser to feign ignorance, since Bessy could never be trusted to interpret rightly any departure from the conventional.
Please tell me what has happened, she said at length.
Bessy, with a smile, released her hand. "John has gone back to the life he prefers--which I take to be a hint to me to do the same."
Justine hesitated again; then the pressure of truth overcame every barrier of expediency. "Bessy--I ought to tell you that I saw Mr. Amherst in town the day I went to Philadelphia. He spoke of going away for a time...he seemed unhappy...but he told me he was coming back to see you first--" She broke off, her clear eyes on her friend's; and she saw at once that Bessy was too self-engrossed to feel any surprise at her avowal. "Surely he came back?" she went on.
Oh, yes--he came back! Bessy sank into the cushions, watching the firelight play on her diamond chain as she repeated the restless gesture of lifting it up and letting it slip through her fingers.
Well--and then?
Then--nothing! I was not here when he came.
You were not here? What had happened?
I had gone over to Blanche Carbury's for a day or two. I was just leaving when I heard he was coming back, and I couldn't throw her over at the last moment.
Justine tried to catch the glance that fluttered evasively under Bessy's lashes. "You knew he was coming--and you chose that time to go to Mrs. Carbury's?"
I didn't choose, my dear--it just happened! And it really happened for the best. I suppose he was annoyed at my going--you know he has a ridiculous prejudice against Blanche--and so the next morning he rushed off to his cotton mill.
There was a pause, while the diamonds continued to flow in threads of fire through Mrs. Amherst's fingers.
At length Justine said: "Did Mr. Amherst know that you knew he was coming back before you left for Mrs. Carbury's?"
Bessy feigned to meditate the question. "Did he know that I knew that he knew?" she mocked. "Yes--I suppose so--he must have known." She stifled a slight yawn as she drew herself languidly to her feet.
Then he took that as your answer?
My answer----?
To his coming back----
So it appears. I told you he had shown unusual tact. Bessy stretched her softly tapering arms above her head and then dropped them along her sides with another yawn. "But it's almost morning--it's wicked of me to have kept you so late, when you must be up to look after all those people!"
She flung her arms with a light gesture about Justine's shoulders, and laid a dry kiss on her cheek.
Don't look at me with those big eyes--they've eaten up the whole of your face! And you needn't think I'm sorry for what I've done, she declared. "I'm _not_--the--least--little--atom--of a bit!"
JUSTINE was pacing the long library at Lynbrook, between the caged sets of standard authors.
She felt as much caged as they: as much a part of a conventional stage-setting totally unrelated to the action going on before it. Two weeks had passed since her return from Philadelphia; and during that time she had learned that her usefulness at Lynbrook was over. Though not unwelcome, she might almost call herself unwanted; life swept by, leaving her tethered to the stake of inaction; a bitter lot for one who chose to measure existence by deeds instead of days. She had found Bessy ostensibly busy with a succession of guests; no one in the house needed her but Cicely, and even Cicely, at times, was caught up into the whirl of her mother's life, swept off on sleighing parties and motor-trips, or carried to town for a dancing-class or an opera matinée.
Mrs. Fenton Carbury was not among the visitors who left Lynbrook on the Monday after Justine's return.
Mr. Carbury, with the other bread-winners of the party, had hastened back to his treadmill in Wall Street after a Sunday spent in silently studying the files of the Financial Record; but his wife stayed on, somewhat aggressively in possession, criticizing and rearranging the furniture, ringing for the servants, making sudden demands on the stable, telegraphing, telephoning, ordering fires lighted or windows opened, and leaving everywhere in her wake a trail of cigarette ashes and cocktail glasses.
Ned Bowfort had not been included in the house-party; but on the day of its dispersal he rode over unannounced for luncheon, put up his horse in the stable, threaded his way familiarly among the dozing dogs in the hall, greeted Mrs. Ansell and Justine with just the right shade of quiet deference, produced from his pocket a new puzzle-game for Cicely, and sat down beside her mother with the quiet urbanity of the family friend who knows his privileges but is too discreet to abuse them.
After that he came every day, sometimes riding home late to the Hunt Club, sometimes accompanying Bessy and Mrs. Carbury to town for dinner and the theatre; but always with his deprecating air of having dropped in by accident, and modestly hoping that his intrusion was not unwelcome.
The following Sunday brought another influx of visitors, and Bessy seemed to fling herself with renewed enthusiasm into the cares of hospitality. She had avoided Justine since their midnight talk, contriving to see her in Cicely's presence, or pleading haste when they found themselves alone. The winter was unusually open, and she spent long hours in the saddle when her time was not taken up with her visitors. For a while she took Cicely on her daily rides; but she soon wearied of adapting her hunter's stride to the pace of the little girl's pony, and Cicely was once more given over to the coachman's care.
Then came snow and a long frost, and Bessy grew restless at her imprisonment, and grumbled that there was no way of keeping well in a winter climate which made regular exercise impossible.
Why not build a squash-court? Blanche Carbury proposed; and the two fell instantly to making plans under the guidance of Ned Bowfort and Westy Gaines. As the scheme developed, various advisers suggested that it was a pity not to add a bowling-alley, a swimming-tank and a gymnasium; a fashionable architect was summoned from town, measurements were taken, sites discussed, sketches compared, and engineers consulted as to the cost of artesian wells and the best system for heating the tank.
Bessy seemed filled with a feverish desire to carry out the plan as quickly as possible, and on as large a scale as even the architect's invention soared to; but it was finally decided that, before signing the contracts, she should run over to New Jersey to see a building of the same kind on which a sporting friend of Mrs. Carbury's had recently lavished a fortune.
It was on this errand that the two ladies, in company with Westy Gaines and Bowfort, had departed on the day which found Justine restlessly measuring the length of the library. She and Mrs. Ansell had the house to themselves; and it was hardly a surprise to her when, in the course of the afternoon, Mrs. Ansell, after a discreet pause on the threshold, advanced toward her down the long room.
Since the night of her return Justine had felt sure that Mrs. Ansell would speak; but the elder lady was given to hawk-like circlings about her subject, to hanging over it and contemplating it before her wings dropped for the descent.
Now, however, it was plain that she had resolved to strike; and Justine had a sense of relief at the thought. She had been too long isolated in her anxiety, her powerlessness to help; and she had a vague hope that Mrs. Ansell's worldly wisdom might accomplish what her inexperience had failed to achieve.
Shall we sit by the fire? I am glad to find you alone, Mrs. Ansell began, with the pleasant abruptness that was one of the subtlest instruments of her indirection; and as Justine acquiesced, she added, yielding her slight lines to the luxurious depths of an arm-chair: "I have been rather suddenly asked by an invalid cousin to go to Europe with her next week, and I can't go contentedly without being at peace about our friends."
She paused, but Justine made no answer. In spite of her growing sympathy for Mrs. Ansell she could not overcome an inherent distrust, not of her methods, but of her ultimate object. What, for instance, was her conception of being at peace about the Amhersts? Justine's own conviction was that, as far as their final welfare was concerned, any terms were better between them than the external harmony which had prevailed during Amherst's stay at Lynbrook.
The subtle emanation of her distrust may have been felt by Mrs. Ansell; for the latter presently continued, with a certain nobleness: "I am the more concerned because I believe I must hold myself, in a small degree, responsible for Bessy's marriage--" and, as Justine looked at her in surprise, she added: "I thought she could never be happy unless her affections were satisfied--and even now I believe so."
I believe so too, Justine said, surprised into assent by the simplicity of Mrs. Ansell's declaration.
Well, then--since we are agreed in our diagnosis, the older woman went on, smiling, "what remedy do you suggest? Or rather, how can we administer it?"
What remedy? Justine hesitated.
Oh, I believe we are agreed on that too. Mr. Amherst must be brought back--but how to bring him? She paused, and then added, with a singular effect of appealing frankness: "I ask you, because I believe you to be the only one of Bessy's friends who is in the least in her husband's confidence."
Justine's embarrassment increased. Would it not be disloyal both to Bessy and Amherst to acknowledge to a third person a fact of which Bessy herself was unaware? Yet to betray embarrassment under Mrs. Ansell's eyes was to risk giving it a dangerous significance.
Bessy has spoken to me once or twice--but I know very little of Mr. Amherst's point of view; except, Justine added, after another moment's weighing of alternatives, "that I believe he suffers most from being cut off from his work at Westmore."
Yes--so I think; but that is a difficulty that time and expediency must adjust. All _we_ can do--their friends, I mean--is to get them together again before the breach is too wide.
Justine pondered. She was perhaps more ignorant of the situation than Mrs. Ansell imagined, for since her talk with Bessy the latter had not again alluded to Amherst's absence, and Justine could merely conjecture that he had carried out his plan of taking the management of the mill he had spoken of. What she most wished to know was whether he had listened to her entreaty, and taken the position temporarily, without binding himself by the acceptance of a salary; or whether, wounded by the outrage of Bessy's flight, he had freed himself from financial dependence by engaging himself definitely as manager.
I really know very little of the present situation, Justine said, looking at Mrs. Ansell. "Bessy merely told me that Mr. Amherst had taken up his old work in a cotton mill in the south."
As her eyes met Mrs. Ansell's it flashed across her that the latter did not believe what she said, and the perception made her instantly shrink back into herself. But there was nothing in Mrs. Ansell's tone to confirm the doubt which her look betrayed.
Ah--I hoped you knew more, she said simply; "for, like you, I have only heard from Bessy that her husband went away suddenly to help a friend who is reorganizing some mills in Georgia. Of course, under the circumstances, such a temporary break is natural enough--perhaps inevitable--only he must not stay away too long."
Justine was silent. Mrs. Ansell's momentary self-betrayal had checked all farther possibility of frank communion, and the discerning lady had seen her error too late to remedy it.
But her hearer's heart gave a leap of joy. It was clear from what Mrs. Ansell said that Amherst had not bound himself definitely, since he would not have done so without informing his wife. And with a secret thrill of happiness Justine recalled his last word to her: "I will remember all you have said."
He had kept that word and acted on it; in spite of Bessy's last assault on his pride he had borne with her, and deferred the day of final rupture; and the sense that she had had a part in his decision filled Justine with a glow of hope. The consciousness of Mrs. Ansell's suspicions faded to insignificance--Mrs. Ansell and her kind might think what they chose, since all that mattered now was that she herself should act bravely and circumspectly in her last attempt to save her friends.
I am not sure, Mrs. Ansell continued, gently scrutinizing her companion, "that I think it unwise of him to have gone; but if he stays too long Bessy may listen to bad advice--advice disastrous to her happiness." She paused, and turned her eyes meditatively toward the fire. "As far as I know," she said, with the same air of serious candour, "you are the only person who can tell him this."
I? exclaimed Justine, with a leap of colour to her pale cheeks.
Mrs. Ansell's eyes continued to avoid her. "My dear Miss Brent, Bessy has told me something of the wise counsels you have given her. Mr. Amherst is also your friend. As I said just now, you are the only person who might act as a link between them--surely you will not renounce the r?le."
Justine controlled herself. "My only r?le, as you call it, has been to urge Bessy to--to try to allow for her husband's views----"
And have you not given the same advice to Mr. Amherst?
The eyes of the two women met. "Yes," said Justine, after a moment.
Then why refuse your help now? The moment is crucial.
Justine's thoughts had flown beyond the stage of resenting Mrs. Ansell's gentle pertinacity. All her faculties were absorbed in the question as to how she could most effectually use whatever influence she possessed.
I put it to you as one old friend to another--will you write to Mr. Amherst to come back? Mrs. Ansell urged her.
Justine was past considering even the strangeness of this request, and its oblique reflection on the kind of power ascribed to her. Through the confused beatings of her heart she merely struggled for a clearer sense of guidance.
No, she said slowly. "I cannot."
You cannot? With a friend's happiness in extremity? Mrs. Ansell paused a moment before she added. "Unless you believe that Bessy would be happier divorced?"
Divorced--? Oh, no, Justine shuddered.
That is what it will come to.
No, no! In time----
Time is what I am most afraid of, when Blanche Carbury disposes of it.
Justine breathed a deep sigh.
You'll write? Mrs. Ansell murmured, laying a soft touch on her hand.
I have not the influence you think----
Can you do any harm by trying?
I might-- Justine faltered, losing her exact sense of the words she used.
Ah, the other flashed back, "then you _have_ influence! Why will you not use it?"
Justine waited a moment; then her resolve gathered itself into words. "If I have any influence, I am not sure it would be well to use it as you suggest."
Not to urge Mr. Amherst's return?
No--not now.
She caught the same veiled gleam of incredulity under Mrs. Ansell's lids--caught and disregarded it.
It must be now or never, Mrs. Ansell insisted.
I can't think so, Justine held out.
Nevertheless--will you try?
No--no! It might be fatal.
To whom?
To both. She considered. "If he came back now I know he would not stay."
Mrs. Ansell was upon her abruptly. "You _know_? Then you speak with authority?"
No--what authority? I speak as I feel, Justine faltered.
The older woman drew herself to her feet. "Ah--then you shoulder a great responsibility!" She moved nearer to Justine, and once more laid a fugitive touch upon her. "You won't write to him?"
No--no, the girl flung back; and the voices of the returning party in the hall made Mrs. Ansell, with an almost imperceptible gesture of warning, turn musingly away toward the fire.
* * * * *
Bessy came back brimming with the wonders she had seen. A glazed "sun-room," mosaic pavements, a marble fountain to feed the marble tank--and outside a water-garden, descending in successive terraces, to take up and utilize--one could see how practically!--the overflow from the tank. If one did the thing at all, why not do it decently? She had given up her new motor, had let her town house, had pinched and stinted herself in a hundred ways--if ever woman was entitled to a little compensating pleasure, surely she was that woman!
The days were crowded with consultations. Architect, contractors, engineers, a landscape gardener, and a dozen minor craftsmen, came and went, unrolled plans, moistened pencils, sketched, figured, argued, persuaded, and filled Bessy with the dread of appearing, under Blanche Carbury's eyes, subject to any restraining influences of economy. What! She was a young woman, with an independent fortune, and she was always wavering, considering, secretly referring back to the mute criticism of an invisible judge--of the husband who had been first to shake himself free of any mutual subjection? The accomplished Blanche did not have to say this--she conveyed it by the raising of painted brows, by a smile of mocking interrogation, a judiciously placed silence or a resigned glance at the architect. So the estimates poured in, were studied, resisted--then yielded to and signed; then the hour of advance payments struck, and an imperious appeal was despatched to Mr. Tredegar, to whom the management of Bessy's affairs had been transferred.
Mr. Tredegar, to his client's surprise, answered the appeal in person. He had not been lately to Lynbrook, dreading the cold and damp of the country in winter; and his sudden arrival had therefore an ominous significance.
He came for an evening in mid-week, when even Blanche Carbury was absent, and Bessy and Justine had the house to themselves. Mrs. Ansell had sailed the week before with her invalid cousin. No farther words had passed between herself and Justine--but the latter was conscious that their talk had increased instead of lessened the distance between them. Justine herself meant to leave soon. Her hope of regaining Bessy's confidence had been deceived, and seeing herself definitely superseded, she chafed anew at her purposeless inactivity. She had already written to one or two doctors in New York, and to the matron of Saint Elizabeth's. She had made herself a name in surgical cases, and it could not be long before a summons came....
Meanwhile Mr. Tredegar arrived, and the three dined together, the two women bending meekly to his discourse, which was never more oracular and authoritative than when delivered to the gentler sex alone. Amherst's absence, in particular, seemed to loose the thin current of Mr. Tredegar's eloquence. He was never quite at ease in the presence of an independent mind, and Justine often reflected that, even had the two men known nothing of each other's views, there would have been between them an instinctive and irreducible hostility--they would have disliked each other if they had merely jostled elbows in the street.
Yet even freed from Amherst's presence Mr. Tredegar showed a darkling brow, and as Justine slipped away after dinner she felt that she left Bessy to something more serious than the usual business conference.
How serious, she was to learn that very night, when, in the small hours, her friend burst in on her tearfully. Bessy was ruined--ruined--that was what Mr. Tredegar had come to tell her! She might have known he would not have travelled to Lynbrook for a trifle.... She had expected to find herself cramped, restricted--to be warned that she must "manage," hateful word!... But this! This was incredible! Unendurable! There was no money to build the gymnasium--none at all! And all because it had been swallowed up at Westmore--because the ridiculous changes there, the changes that nobody wanted, nobody approved of--that Truscomb and all the other experts had opposed and derided from the first--these changes, even modified and arrested, had already involved so much of her income, that it might be years--yes, he said _years_!--before she would feel herself free again--free of her own fortune, of Cicely's fortune...of the money poor Dick Westmore had meant his wife and child to enjoy!
Justine listened anxiously to this confused outpouring of resentments. Bessy's born incapacity for figures made it indeed possible that the facts came on her as a surprise--that she had quite forgotten the temporary reduction of her income, and had begun to imagine that what she had saved in one direction was hers to spend in another. All this was conceivable. But why had Mr. Tredegar drawn so dark a picture of the future? Or was it only that, thwarted of her immediate desire, Bessy's disappointment blackened the farthest verge of her horizon? Justine, though aware of her friend's lack of perspective, suspected that a conniving hand had helped to throw the prospect out of drawing....
Could it be possible, then, that Mr. Tredegar was among those who desired a divorce? That the influences at which Mrs. Ansell had hinted proceeded not only from Blanche Carbury and her group? Helpless amid this rush of forebodings, Justine could do no more than soothe and restrain--to reason would have been idle. She had never till now realized how completely she had lost ground with Bessy.
The humiliation--before my friends! Oh, I was warned...my father, every one...for Cicely's sake I was warned...but I wouldn't listen--and _now_! From the first it was all he cared for--in Europe, even, he was always dragging me to factories. _Me?_--I was only the owner of Westmore! He wanted power--power, that's all--when he lost it he left me...oh, I'm glad now my baby is dead! Glad there's nothing between us--nothing, nothing in the world to tie us together any longer!
The disproportion between this violent grief and its trivial cause would have struck Justine as simply grotesque, had she not understood that the incident of the gymnasium, which followed with cumulative pressure on a series of similar episodes, seemed to Bessy like the reaching out of a retaliatory hand--a mocking reminder that she was still imprisoned in the consequences of her unhappy marriage.
Such folly seemed past weeping for--it froze Justine's compassion into disdain, till she remembered that the sources of our sorrow are sometimes nobler than their means of expression, and that a baffled unappeased love was perhaps the real cause of Bessy's anger against her husband.
At any rate, the moment was a critical one, and Justine remembered with a pang that Mrs. Ansell had foreseen such a contingency, and implored her to take measures against it. She had refused, from a sincere dread of precipitating a definite estrangement--but had she been right in judging the situation so logically? With a creature of Bessy's emotional uncertainties the result of contending influences was really incalculable--it might still be that, at this juncture, Amherst's return would bring about a reaction of better feelings....
Justine sat and mused on these things after leaving her friend exhausted upon a tearful pillow. She felt that she had perhaps taken too large a survey of the situation--that the question whether there could ever be happiness between this tormented pair was not one to concern those who struggled for their welfare. Most marriages are a patch-work of jarring tastes and ill-assorted ambitions--if here and there, for a moment, two colours blend, two textures are the same, so much the better for the pattern! Justine, certainly, could foresee in reunion no positive happiness for either of her friends; but she saw positive disaster for Bessy in separation from her husband....
Suddenly she rose from her chair by the falling fire, and crossed over to the writing-table. She would write to Amherst herself--she would tell him to come. The decision once reached, hope flowed back to her heart--the joy of action so often deceived her into immediate faith in its results!
Dear Mr. Amherst, she wrote, "the last time I saw you, you told me you would remember what I said. I ask you to do so now--to remember that I urged you not to be away too long. I believe you ought to come back now, though I know Bessy will not ask you to. I am writing without her knowledge, but with the conviction that she needs you, though perhaps without knowing it herself...."
She paused, and laid down her pen. Why did it make her so happy to write to him? Was it merely the sense of recovered helpfulness, or something warmer, more personal, that made it a joy to trace his name, and to remind him of their last intimate exchange of words? Well--perhaps it was that too. There were moments when she was so mortally lonely that any sympathetic contact with another life sent a glow into her veins--that she was thankful to warm herself at any fire.
BESSY, languidly glancing through her midday mail some five days later, uttered a slight exclamation as she withdrew her finger-tip from the flap of the envelope she had begun to open.
It was a black sleety day, with an east wind bowing the trees beyond the drenched window-panes, and the two friends, after luncheon, had withdrawn to the library, where Justine sat writing notes for Bessy, while the latter lay back in her arm-chair, in the state of dreamy listlessness into which she always sank when not under the stimulus of amusement or exercise.
She sat suddenly upright as her eyes fell on the letter.
I beg your pardon! I thought it was for me, she said, holding it out to Justine.
The latter reddened as she glanced at the superscription. It had not occurred to her that Amherst would reply to her appeal: she had pictured him springing on the first north-bound train, perhaps not even pausing to announce his return to his wife.... And to receive his letter under Bessy's eye was undeniably embarrassing, since Justine felt the necessity of keeping her intervention secret.
But under Bessy's eye she certainly was--it continued to rest on her curiously, speculatively, with an under-gleam of malicious significance.
So stupid of me--I can't imagine why I should have expected my husband to write to me! Bessy went on, leaning back in lazy contemplation of her other letters, but still obliquely including Justine in her angle of vision.
The latter, after a moment's pause, broke the seal and read.
"Millfield, Georgia. My dear Miss Brent,
" "Your letter reached me yesterday and I have thought it over carefully. I appreciate the feeling that prompted it--but I don't know that any friend, however kind and discerning, can give the final advice in such matters. You tell me you are sure my wife will not ask me to return--well, under present conditions that seems to me a sufficient reason for staying away. Meanwhile, I assure you that I have remembered all you said to me
"that day. I have made no binding arrangement here--nothing to
involve my future action--and I have done this solely because you
asked it. This will tell you better than words how much I value
your advice, and what strong reasons I must have for not following
it now.
"I suppose there are no more exploring parties in this weather. I wish I could show Cicely some of the birds down here. Yours faithfully,
" "John Amherst. Please don't let my wife ride Impulse.""
"Latent under Justine's acute consciousness of what this letter meant, was the sense of Bessy's inferences and conjectures. She could feel them actually piercing the page in her hand like some hypersensitive visual organ to which matter offers no obstruction. Or rather, baffled in their endeavour, they were evoking out of the unseen, heaven knew what fantastic structure of intrigue--scrawling over the innocent page with burning evidences of perfidy and collusion....
One thing became instantly clear to her: she must show the letter to Bessy. She ran her eyes over it again, trying to disentangle the consequences. There was the allusion to their talk in town--well, she had told Bessy of that! But the careless reference to their woodland excursions--what might not Bessy, in her present mood, make of it? Justine's uppermost thought was of distress at the failure of her plan. Perhaps she might still have induced Amherst to come back, had it not been for this accident; but now that hope was destroyed.
She raised her eyes and met Bessy's. "Will you read it?" she said, holding out the letter.
Bessy received it with lifted brows, and a protesting murmur--but as she read, Justine saw the blood mount under her clear skin, invade the temples, the nape, even the little flower-like ears; then it receded as suddenly, ebbing at last from the very lips, so that the smile with which she looked up from her reading was as white as if she had been under the stress of physical pain.
So you have written my husband to come back?
As you see.
Bessy looked her straight in the eyes. "I am very much obliged to you--extremely obliged!"
Justine met the look quietly. "Which means that you resent my interference----"
Oh, I leave you to call it that! Bessy mocked, tossing the letter down on the table at her side.
Bessy! Don't take it in that way. If I made a mistake I did so with the hope of helping you. How can I stand by, after all these months together, and see you deliberately destroying your life without trying to stop you?
The smile withered on Bessy's lips. "It is very dear and good of you--I know you're never happy unless you're helping people--but in this case I can only repeat what my husband says. He and I don't often look at things in the same light--but I quite agree with him that the management of such matters is best left to--to the persons concerned."
Justine hesitated. "I might answer that, if you take that view, it was inconsistent of you to talk with me so openly. You've certainly made me feel that you wanted help--you've turned to me for it. But perhaps that does not justify my writing to Mr. Amherst without your knowing it."
Bessy laughed. "Ah, my dear, you knew that if you asked me the letter would never be sent!"
Perhaps I did, said Justine simply. "I was trying to help you against your will."
Well, you see the result. Bessy laid a derisive touch on the letter. "Do you understand now whose fault it is if I am alone?"
Justine faced her steadily. "There is nothing in Mr. Amherst's letter to make me change my opinion. I still think it lies with you to bring him back."
Bessy raised a glittering face to her--all hardness and laughter. "Such modesty, my dear! As if I had a chance of succeeding where you failed!"
She sprang up, brushing the curls from her temples with a petulant gesture. "Don't mind me if I'm cross--but I've had a dose of preaching from Maria Ansell, and I don't know why my friends should treat me like a puppet without any preferences of my own, and press me upon a man who has done his best to show that he doesn't want me. As a matter of fact, he and I are luckily agreed on that point too--and I'm afraid all the good advice in the world won't persuade us to change our opinion!"
Justine held her ground. "If I believed that of either of you, I shouldn't have written--I should not be pleading with you now--And Mr. Amherst doesn't believe it either," she added, after a pause, conscious of the risk she was taking, but thinking the words might act like a blow in the face of a person sinking under a deadly narcotic.
Bessy's smile deepened to a sneer. "I see you've talked me over thoroughly--and on _his_ views I ought perhaps not to have risked an opinion----"
We have not talked you over, Justine exclaimed. "Mr. Amherst could never talk of you...in the way you think...." And under the light staccato of Bessy's laugh she found resolution to add: "It is not in that way that I know what he feels."
Ah? I should be curious to hear, then----
Justine turned to the letter, which still lay between them. "Will you read the last sentence again? The postscript, I mean."
Bessy, after a surprised glance at her, took the letter up with the deprecating murmur of one who acts under compulsion rather than dispute about a trifle.
The postscript? Let me see...'Don't let my wife ride Impulse.'--_Et puis?_ she murmured, dropping the page again.
Well, does it tell you nothing? It's a cold letter--at first I thought so--the letter of a man who believes himself deeply hurt--so deeply that he will make no advance, no sign of relenting. That's what I thought when I first read it...but the postscript undoes it all.
Justine, as she spoke, had drawn near Bessy, laying a hand on her arm, and shedding on her the radiance of a face all charity and sweet compassion. It was her rare gift, at such moments, to forget her own relation to the person for whose fate she was concerned, to cast aside all consciousness of criticism and distrust in the heart she strove to reach, as pitiful people forget their physical timidity in the attempt to help a wounded animal.
For a moment Bessy seemed to waver. The colour flickered faintly up her cheek, her long lashes drooped--she had the tenderest lids!--and all her face seemed melting under the beams of Justine's ardour. But the letter was still in her hand--her eyes, in sinking, fell upon it, and she sounded beneath her breath the fatal phrase: "'I have done this solely because you asked it.'
After such a tribute to your influence I don't wonder you feel competent to set everybody's affairs in order! But take my advice, my dear--_don't_ ask me not to ride Impulse!
The pity froze on Justine's lip: she shrank back cut to the quick. For a moment the silence between the two women rang with the flight of arrowy, wounding thoughts; then Bessy's anger flagged, she gave one of her embarrassed half-laughs, and turning back, laid a deprecating touch on her friend's arm.
I didn't mean that, Justine...but let us not talk now--I can't!
Justine did not move: the reaction could not come as quickly in her case. But she turned on Bessy two eyes full of pardon, full of speechless pity...and Bessy received the look silently before she moved to the door and went out.
Oh, poor thing--poor thing! Justine gasped as the door closed.
She had already forgotten her own hurt--she was alone again with Bessy's sterile pain. She stood staring before her for a moment--then her eyes fell on Amherst's letter, which had fluttered to the floor between them. The fatal letter! If it had not come at that unlucky moment perhaps she might still have gained her end.... She picked it up and re-read it. Yes--there were phrases in it that a wounded suspicious heart might misconstrue.... Yet Bessy's last words had absolved her.... Why had she not answered them? Why had she stood there dumb? The blow to her pride had been too deep, had been dealt too unexpectedly--for one miserable moment she had thought first of herself! Ah, that importunate, irrepressible self--the _moi ha?ssable_ of the Christian--if only one could tear it from one's breast! She had missed an opportunity--her last opportunity perhaps! By this time, even, a hundred hostile influences, cold whispers of vanity, of selfishness, of worldly pride, might have drawn their freezing ring about Bessy's heart....
Justine started up to follow her...then paused, recalling her last words. "Let us not talk now--I can't!" She had no right to intrude on that bleeding privacy--if the chance had been hers she had lost it. She dropped back into her seat at the desk, hiding her face in her hands.
Presently she heard the clock strike, and true to her tireless instinct of activity, she lifted her head, took up her pen, and went on with the correspondence she had dropped.... It was hard at first to collect her thoughts, or even to summon to her pen the conventional phrases that sufficed for most of the notes. Groping for a word, she pushed aside her writing and stared out at the sallow frozen landscape framed by the window at which she sat. The sleet had ceased, and hollows of sunless blue showed through the driving wind-clouds. A hard sky and a hard ground--frost-bound ringing earth under rigid ice-mailed trees.
As Justine looked out, shivering a little, she saw a woman's figure riding down the avenue toward the gate. The figure disappeared behind a clump of evergreens--showed again farther down, through the boughs of a skeleton beech--and revealed itself in the next open space as Bessy--Bessy in the saddle on a day of glaring frost, when no horse could keep his footing out of a walk!
Justine went to the window and strained her eyes for a confirming glimpse. Yes--it was Bessy! There was no mistaking that light flexible figure, every line swaying true to the beat of the horse's stride. But Justine remembered that Bessy had not meant to ride--had countermanded her horse because of the bad going.... Well, she was a perfect horsewoman and had no doubt chosen her surest-footed mount...probably the brown cob, Tony Lumpkin.
But when did Tony's sides shine so bright through the leafless branches? And when did he sweep his rider on with such long free play of the hind-quarters? Horse and rider shot into sight again, rounding the curve of the avenue near the gates, and in a break of sunlight Justine saw the glitter of chestnut flanks--and remembered that Impulse was the only chestnut in the stables....
* * * * *
She went back to her seat and continued writing. Bessy had left a formidable heap of bills and letters; and when this was demolished, Justine had her own correspondence to despatch. She had heard that morning from the matron of Saint Elizabeth's: an interesting "case" was offered her, but she must come within two days. For the first few hours she had wavered, loath to leave Lynbrook without some definite light on her friend's future; but now Amherst's letter had shed that light--or rather, had deepened the obscurity--and she had no pretext for lingering on where her uselessness had been so amply demonstrated.
She wrote to the matron accepting the engagement; and the acceptance involved the writing of other letters, the general reorganizing of that minute polity, the life of Justine Brent. She smiled a little to think how easily she could be displaced and transplanted--how slender were her material impedimenta, how few her invisible bonds! She was as light and detachable as a dead leaf on the autumn breeze--yet she was in the season of sap and flower, when there is life and song in the trees!
But she did not think long of herself, for an undefinable anxiety ran through her thoughts like a black thread. It found expression, now and then, in the long glances she threw through the window--in her rising to consult the clock and compare her watch with it--in a nervous snatch of humming as she paced the room once or twice before going back to her desk....
Why was Bessy so late? Dusk was falling already--the early end of the cold slate-hued day. But Bessy always rode late--there was always a rational answer to Justine's irrational conjectures.... It was the sight of those chestnut flanks that tormented her--she knew of Bessy's previous struggles with the mare. But the indulging of idle apprehensions was not in her nature, and when the tea-tray came, and with it Cicely, sparkling from a gusty walk, and coral-pink in her cloud of crinkled hair, Justine sprang up and cast off her cares.
It cost her a pang, again, to see the lamps lit and the curtains drawn--shutting in the warmth and brightness of the house from that wind-swept frozen twilight through which Bessy rode alone. But the icy touch of the thought slipped from Justine's mind as she bent above the tea-tray, gravely measuring Cicely's milk into a "grown-up" teacup, hearing the confidential details of the child's day, and capping them with banter and fantastic narrative.
She was not sorry to go--ah, no! The house had become a prison to her, with ghosts walking its dreary floors. But to lose Cicely would be bitter--she had not felt how bitter till the child pressed against her in the firelight, insisting raptly, with little sharp elbows stabbing her knee: "And _then_ what happened, Justine?"
The door opened, and some one came in to look at the fire. Justine, through the mazes of her fairy-tale, was dimly conscious that it was Knowles, and not one of the footmen...the proud Knowles, who never mended the fires himself.... As he passed out again, hovering slowly down the long room, she rose, leaving Cicely on the hearth-rug, and followed him to the door.
Has Mrs. Amherst not come in? she asked, not knowing why she wished to ask it out of the child's hearing.
No, miss. I looked in myself to see--thinking she might have come by the side-door.
She may have gone to her sitting-room.
She's not upstairs.
They both paused. Then Justine said: "What horse was she riding?"
Impulse, Miss. The butler looked at his large responsible watch. "It's not late--" he said, more to himself than to her.
No. Has she been riding Impulse lately?
No, Miss. Not since that day the mare nearly had her off. I understood Mr. Amherst did not wish it.
Justine went back to Cicely and the fairy-tale.--As she took up the thread of the Princess's adventures, she asked herself why she had ever had any hope of helping Bessy. The seeds of disaster were in the poor creature's soul.... Even when she appeared to be moved, lifted out of herself, her escaping impulses were always dragged back to the magnetic centre of hard distrust and resistance that sometimes forms the core of soft-fibred natures. As she had answered her husband's previous appeal by her flight to the woman he disliked, so she answered this one by riding the horse he feared.... Justine's last illusions crumbled. The distance between two such natures was unspannable. Amherst had done well to remain away...and with a tidal rush her sympathies swept back to his side....
* * * * *
The governess came to claim Cicely. One of the footmen came to put another log on the fire. Then the rite of removing the tea-table was majestically performed--the ceremonial that had so often jarred on Amherst's nerves. As she watched it, Justine had a vague sense of the immutability of the household routine--a queer awed feeling that, whatever happened, a machine so perfectly adjusted would work on inexorably, like a natural law....
She rose to look out of the window, staring vainly into blackness between the parted curtains. As she turned back, passing the writing-table, she noticed that Cicely's irruption had made her forget to post her letters--an unusual oversight. A glance at the clock told her that she was not too late for the mail--reminding her, at the same time, that it was scarcely three hours since Bessy had started on her ride.... She saw the foolishness of her fears. Even in winter, Bessy often rode for more than three hours; and now that the days were growing longer----
Suddenly reassured, Justine went out into the hall, intending to carry her batch of letters to the red pillar-box by the door. As she did so, a cold blast struck her. Could it be that for once the faultless routine of the house had been relaxed, that one of the servants had left the outer door ajar? She walked over to the vestibule--yes, both doors were wide. The night rushed in on a vicious wind. As she pushed the vestibule door shut, she heard the dogs sniffing and whining on the threshold. She crossed the vestibule, and heard voices and the tramping of feet in the darkness--then saw a lantern gleam. Suddenly Knowles shot out of the night--the lantern struck on his bleached face.
Justine, stepping back, pressed the electric button in the wall, and the wide door-step was abruptly illuminated, with its huddled, pushing, heavily-breathing group...black figures writhing out of darkness, strange faces distorted in the glare.
Bessy! she cried, and sprang forward; but suddenly Wyant was before her, his hand on her arm; and as the dreadful group struggled by into the hall, he froze her to him with a whisper: "The spine----"
WITHIN Justine there was a moment's darkness; then, like terror-struck workers rallying to their tasks, every faculty was again at its post, receiving and transmitting signals, taking observations, anticipating orders, making her brain ring with the hum of a controlled activity.
She had known the sensation before--the transmuting of terror and pity into this miraculous lucidity of thought and action; but never had it snatched her from such depths. Oh, thank heaven for her knowledge now--for the trained mind that could take command of her senses and bend them firmly to its service!
Wyant seconded her well, after a moment's ague-fit of fear. She pitied and pardoned the moment, aware of its cause, and respecting him for the way in which he rose above it into the clear air of professional self-command. Through the first hours they worked shoulder to shoulder, conscious of each other only as of kindred will-powers, stretched to the utmost tension of discernment and activity, and hardly needing speech or look to further their swift co-operation. It was thus that she had known him in the hospital, in the heat of his youthful zeal: the doctor she liked best to work with, because no other so tempered ardour with judgment.
The great surgeon, arriving from town at midnight, confirmed his diagnosis: there was undoubted injury to the spine. Other consultants were summoned in haste, and in the winter dawn the verdict was pronounced--a fractured vertebra, and possibly lesion of the cord....
Justine got a moment alone when the surgeons returned to the sick-room. Other nurses were there now, capped, aproned, quickly and silently unpacking their appliances.... She must call a halt, clear her brain again, decide rapidly what was to be done next.... Oh, if only the crawling hours could bring Amherst! It was strange that there was no telegram yet--no, not strange, after all, since it was barely six in the morning, and her message had not been despatched till seven the night before. It was not unlikely that, in that little southern settlement, the telegraph office closed at six.
She stood in Bessy's sitting-room, her forehead pressed to the window-pane, her eyes straining out into the thin February darkness, through which the morning star swam white. As soon as she had yielded her place to the other nurses her nervous tension relaxed, and she hung again above the deeps of anguish, terrified and weak. In a moment the necessity for action would snatch her back to a firm footing--her thoughts would clear, her will affirm itself, all the wheels of the complex machine resume their functions. But now she felt only the horror....
She knew so well what was going on in the next room. Dr. Garford, the great surgeon, who had known her at Saint Elizabeth's, had evidently expected her to take command of the nurses he had brought from town; but there were enough without her, and there were other cares which, for the moment, she only could assume--the despatching of messages to the scattered family, the incessant telephoning and telegraphing to town, the general guidance of the household swinging rudderless in the tide of disaster. Cicely, above all, must be watched over and guarded from alarm. The little governess, reduced to a twittering heap of fears, had been quarantined in a distant room till reason returned to her; and the child, meanwhile, slept quietly in the old nurse's care.
Cicely would wake presently, and Justine must go up to her with a bright face; other duties would press thick on the heels of this; their feet were already on the threshold. But meanwhile she could only follow in imagination what was going on in the other room....
She had often thought with dread of such a contingency. She always sympathized too much with her patients--she knew it was the joint in her armour. Her quick-gushing pity lay too near that professional exterior which she had managed to endue with such a bright glaze of insensibility that some sentimental patients--without much the matter--had been known to call her "a little hard." How, then, should she steel herself if it fell to her lot to witness a cruel accident to some one she loved, and to have to perform a nurse's duties, steadily, expertly, unflinchingly, while every fibre was torn with inward anguish?
She knew the horror of it now--and she knew also that her self-enforced exile from the sick-room was a hundred times worse. To stand there, knowing, with each tick of the clock, what was being said and done within--how the great luxurious room, with its pale draperies and scented cushions, and the hundred pretty trifles strewing the lace toilet-table and the delicate old furniture, was being swept bare, cleared for action like a ship's deck, drearily garnished with rows of instruments, rolls of medicated cotton, oiled silk, bottles, bandages, water-pillows--all the grim paraphernalia of the awful rites of pain: to know this, and to be able to call up with torturing vividness that poor pale face on the pillows, vague-eyed, expressionless, perhaps, as she had last seen it, or--worse yet--stirred already with the first creeping pangs of consciousness: to have these images slowly, deliberately burn themselves into her brain, and to be aware, at the same time, of that underlying moral disaster, of which the accident seemed the monstrous outward symbol--ah, this was worse than anything she had ever dreamed!
She knew that the final verdict could not be pronounced till the operation which was about to take place should reveal the extent of injury to the spine. Bessy, in falling, must have struck on the back of her head and shoulders, and it was but too probable that the fractured vertebra had caused a bruise if not a lesion of the spinal cord. In that case paralysis was certain--and a slow crawling death the almost inevitable outcome. There had been cases, of course--Justine's professional memory evoked them--cases of so-called "recovery," where actual death was kept at bay, a semblance of life preserved for years in the poor petrified body.... But the mind shrank from such a fate for Bessy. And it might still be that the injury to the spine was not grave--though, here again, the fracturing of the fourth vertebra was ominous.
The door opened and some one came from the inner room--Wyant, in search of an instrument-case. Justine turned and they looked at each other.
It will be now?
Yes. Dr. Garford asked if there was no one you could send for.
No one but Mr. Tredegar and the Halford Gaineses. They'll be here this evening, I suppose.
They exchanged a discouraged glance, knowing how little difference the presence of the Halford Gaineses would make.
He wanted to know if there was no telegram from Amherst.
No.
Then they mean to begin.
A nursemaid appeared in the doorway. "Miss Cicely--" she said; and Justine bounded upstairs.
The day's work had begun. From Cicely to the governess--from the governess to the housekeeper--from the telephone to the writing-table--Justine vibrated back and forth, quick, noiseless, self-possessed--sobering, guiding, controlling her confused and panic-stricken world. It seemed to her that half the day had elapsed before the telegraph office at Lynbrook opened--she was at the telephone at the stroke of the hour. No telegram? Only one--a message from Halford Gaines--"Arrive at eight tonight." Amherst was still silent! Was there a difference of time to be allowed for? She tried to remember, to calculate, but her brain was too crowded with other thoughts.... She turned away from the instrument discouraged.
Whenever she had time to think, she was overwhelmed by the weight of her solitude. Mr. Langhope was in Egypt, accessible only through a London banker--Mrs. Ansell presumably wandering on the continent. Her cables might not reach them for days. And among the throng of Lynbrook habitués, she knew not to whom to turn. To loose the Telfer tribe and Mrs. Carbury upon that stricken house--her thought revolted from it, and she was thankful to know that February had dispersed their migratory flock to southern shores. But if only Amherst would come!
Cicely and the tranquillized governess had been despatched on a walk with the dogs, and Justine was returning upstairs when she met one of the servants with a telegram. She tore it open with a great throb of relief. It was her own message to Amherst--_address unknown_....
Had she misdirected it, then? In that first blinding moment her mind might so easily have failed her. But no--there was the name of the town before her...Millfield, Georgia...the same name as in his letter.... She had made no mistake, but he was gone! Gone--and without leaving an address.... For a moment her tired mind refused to work; then she roused herself, ran down the stairs again, and rang up the telegraph-office. The thing to do, of course, was to telegraph to the owner of the mills--of whose very name she was ignorant!--enquiring where Amherst was, and asking him to forward the message. Precious hours must be lost meanwhile--but, after all, they were waiting for no one upstairs.
* * * * *
The verdict had been pronounced: dislocation and fracture of the fourth vertebra, with consequent injury to the spinal cord. Dr. Garford and Wyant came out alone to tell her. The surgeon ran over the technical details, her brain instantly at attention as he developed his diagnosis and issued his orders. She asked no questions as to the future--she knew it was impossible to tell. But there were no immediate signs of a fatal ending: the patient had rallied well, and the general conditions were not unfavourable.
You have heard from Mr. Amherst? Dr. Garford concluded.
Not yet...he may be travelling, Justine faltered, unwilling to say that her telegram had been returned. As she spoke there was a tap on the door, and a folded paper was handed in--a telegram telephoned from the village.
Amherst gone South America to study possibilities cotton growing have cabled our correspondent Buenos Ayres.
Concealment was no longer possible. Justine handed the message to the surgeon.
Ah--and there would be no chance of finding his address among Mrs. Amherst's papers?
I think not--no.
Well--we must keep her alive, Wyant.
Yes, sir.
* * * * *
At dusk, Justine sat in the library, waiting for Cicely to be brought to her. A lull had descended on the house--a new order developed out of the morning's chaos. With soundless steps, with lowered voices, the machinery of life was carried on. And Justine, caught in one of the pauses of inaction which she had fought off since morning, was reliving, for the hundredth time, her few moments at Bessy's bedside....
She had been summoned in the course of the afternoon, and stealing into the darkened room, had bent over the bed while the nurses noiselessly withdrew. There lay the white face which had been burnt into her inward vision--the motionless body, and the head stirring ceaselessly, as though to release the agitation of the imprisoned limbs. Bessy's eyes turned to her, drawing her down.
Am I going to die, Justine?
No.
The pain is...so awful....
It will pass...you will sleep....
Cicely----
She has gone for a walk. You'll see her presently.
The eyes faded, releasing Justine. She stole away, and the nurses came back.
Bessy had spoken of Cicely--but not a word of her husband! Perhaps her poor dazed mind groped for him, or perhaps it shrank from his name.... Justine was thankful for her silence. For the moment her heart was bitter against Amherst. Why, so soon after her appeal and his answer, had he been false to the spirit of their agreement? This unannounced, unexplained departure was nothing less than a breach of his tacit pledge--the pledge not to break definitely with Lynbrook. And why had he gone to South America? She drew her aching brows together, trying to retrace a vague memory of some allusion to the cotton-growing capabilities of the region.... Yes, he had spoken of it once in talking of the world's area of cotton production. But what impulse had sent him off on such an exploration? Mere unrest, perhaps--the intolerable burden of his useless life? The questions spun round and round in her head, weary, profitless, yet persistent....
It was a relief when Cicely came--a relief to measure out the cambric tea, to make the terrier beg for ginger-bread, even to take up the thread of the interrupted fairy-tale--though through it all she was wrung by the thought that, just twenty-four hours earlier, she and the child had sat in the same place, listening for the trot of Bessy's horse....
The day passed: the hands of the clocks moved, food was cooked and served, blinds were drawn up or down, lamps lit and fires renewed...all these tokens of the passage of time took place before her, while her real consciousness seemed to hang in some dim central void, where nothing happened, nothing would ever happen....
And now Cicely was in bed, the last "long-distance" call was answered, the last orders to kitchen and stable had been despatched, Wyant had stolen down to her with his hourly report--"no change"--and she was waiting in the library for the Gaineses.
Carriage-wheels on the gravel: they were there at last. Justine started up and went into the hall. As she passed out of the library the outer door opened, and the gusty night swooped in--as, at the same hour the day before, it had swooped in ahead of the dreadful procession--preceding now the carriageful of Hanaford relations: Mr. Gaines, red-glazed, brief and interrogatory; Westy, small, nervous, ill at ease with his grief; and Mrs. Gaines, supreme in the possession of a consolatory yet funereal manner, and sinking on Justine's breast with the solemn whisper: "Have you sent for the clergyman?"
A week had passed since Bessy's accident, and friends and relations had dispersed. The household had fallen into its routine, the routine of sickness and silence, and once more the perfectly-adjusted machine was working on steadily, inexorably, like a natural law....
So at least it seemed to Justine's nerves, intolerably stretched, at times, on the rack of solitude, of suspense, of forebodings. She had been thankful when the Gaineses left--doubly thankful when a telegram from Bermuda declared Mrs. Carbury to be "in despair" at her inability to fly to Bessy's side--thankful even that Mr. Tredegar's professional engagements made it impossible for him to do more than come down, every second or third day, for a few hours; yet, though in some ways it was a relief to be again in sole command, there were moments when the weight of responsibility, and the inability to cry out her fears and her uncertainties, seemed almost unendurable.
Wyant was her chief reliance. He had risen so gallantly above his weakness, become again so completely the indefatigable worker of former days, that she accused herself of injustice in ascribing to physical causes the vague eye and tremulous hand which might merely have betokened a passing access of nervous sensibility. Now, at any rate, he had his nerves so well under control, and had shown such a grasp of the case, and such marked executive capacity, that on the third day after the accident Dr. Garford, withdrawing his own assistant, had left him in control at Lynbrook.
At the same time Justine had taken up her attendance in the sick-room, replacing one of the subordinate nurses who had been suddenly called away. She had done this the more willingly because Bessy, who was now conscious for the greater part of the time, had asked for her once or twice, and had seemed easier when she was in the room. But she still gave only occasional aid, relieving the other nurses when they dined or rested, but keeping herself partly free in order to have an eye on the household, and give a few hours daily to Cicely.
All this had become part of a system that already seemed as old as memory. She could hardly recall what life had been before the accident--the seven dreadful days seemed as long as the days of creation. Every morning she rose to the same report--"no change"--and every day passed without a word from Amherst. Minor news, of course, had come: poor Mr. Langhope, at length overtaken at Wady Halfa, was hastening back as fast as ship and rail could carry him; Mrs. Ansell, anchored at Algiers with her invalid, cabled anxious enquiries; but still no word from Amherst. The correspondent at Buenos Ayres had simply cabled "Not here. Will enquire"--and since then, silence.
Justine had taken to sitting in a small room beyond Amherst's bedroom, near enough to Bessy to be within call, yet accessible to the rest of the household. The walls were hung with old prints, and with two or three photographs of early Italian pictures; and in a low bookcase Amherst had put the books he had brought from Hanaford--the English poets, the Greek dramatists, some text-books of biology and kindred subjects, and a few stray well-worn volumes: Lecky's European Morals, Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm Meister, Seneca, Epictetus, a German grammar, a pocket Bacon.
It was unlike any other room at Lynbrook--even through her benumbing misery, Justine felt the relief of escaping there from the rest of the great soulless house. Sometimes she took up one of the books and read a page or two, letting the beat of the verse lull her throbbing brain, or the strong words of stoic wisdom sink into her heart. And even when there was no time for these brief flights from reality, it soothed her to feel herself in the presence of great thoughts--to know that in this room, among these books, another restless baffled mind had sought escape from the "dusty answer" of life. Her hours there made her think less bitterly of Amherst--but also, alas, made her see more clearly the irreconcilable difference between the two natures she had striven to reunite. That which was the essence of life to one was a meaningless shadow to the other; and the gulf between them was too wide for the imagination of either to bridge.
As she sat there on the seventh afternoon there was a knock on the door and Wyant entered. She had only time to notice that he was very pale--she had been struck once or twice with his look of sudden exhaustion, which passed as quickly as it came--then she saw that he carried a telegram, and her mind flew back to its central anxiety. She grew pale herself as she read the message.
He has been found--at Corrientes. It will take him at least a month to get here.
A month--good God!
And it may take Mr. Langhope longer. Their eyes met. "It's too long----?" she asked.
I don't know--I don't know. He shivered slightly, turning away into the window.
Justine sat down to dash off messages to Mr. Tredegar and the Gaineses: Amherst's return must be made known at once. When she glanced up, Wyant was standing near her. His air of intense weariness had passed, and he looked calm and ready for action.
Shall I take these down?
No. Ring, please. I want to ask you a few questions.
The servant who answered the bell brought in a tea-tray, and Justine, having despatched the telegrams, seated herself and began to pour out her tea. Food had been repugnant to her during the first anguished unsettled days, but with the resumption of the nurse's systematic habits the nurse's punctual appetite returned. Every drop of energy must be husbanded now, and only sleep and nourishment could fill the empty cisterns.
She held out a cup to Wyant, but he drew back with a gesture of aversion.
Thanks; I'm not hungry.
You ought to eat more.
No, no. I'm very well.
She lifted her head, revived by the warm draught. The mechanical act of nourishment performed, her mind leapt back to the prospect of Amherst's return. A whole month before he reached Lynbrook! He had instructed her where news might find him on the way ... but a whole month to wait!
She looked at Wyant, and they read each other's thoughts.
It's a long time, he said.
Yes.
But Garford can do wonders--and she's very strong.
Justine shuddered. Just so a skilled agent of the Inquisition might have spoken, calculating how much longer the power of suffering might be artificially preserved in a body broken on the wheel....
How does she seem to you today?
The general conditions are about the same. The heart keeps up wonderfully, but there is a little more oppression of the diaphragm.
Yes--her breathing is harder. Last night she suffered horribly at times.
Oh--she'll suffer, Wyant murmured. "Of course the hypodermics can be increased."
Just what did Dr. Garford say this morning?
He is astonished at her strength.
But there's no hope?--I don't know why I ask!
Hope? Wyant looked at her. "You mean of what's called recovery--of deferring death indefinitely?"
She nodded.
How can Garford tell--or any one? We all know there have been cases where such injury to the cord has not caused death. This may be one of those cases; but the biggest man couldn't say now.
Justine hid her eyes. "What a fate!"
Recovery? Yes. Keeping people alive in such cases is one of the refinements of cruelty that it was left for Christianity to invent.
And yet--?
And yet--it's got to be! Science herself says so--not for the patient, of course; but for herself--for unborn generations, rather. Queer, isn't it? The two creeds are at one.
Justine murmured through her clasped hands: "I wish she were not so strong----"
Yes; it's wonderful what those frail petted bodies can stand. The fight is going to be a hard one.
She rose with a shiver. "I must go to Cicely----" The rector of Saint Anne's had called again. Justine, in obedience to Mrs. Gaines's suggestion, had summoned him from Clifton the day after the accident; but, supported by the surgeons and Wyant, she had resisted his admission to the sick-room. Bessy's religious practices had been purely mechanical: her faith had never been associated with the graver moments of her life, and the apparition of a clerical figure at her bedside would portend not consolation but calamity. Since it was all-important that her nervous strength should be sustained, and the gravity of the situation kept from her, Mrs. Gaines yielded to the medical commands, consoled by the ready acquiescence of the rector. But before she left she extracted a promise that he would call frequently at Lynbrook, and wait his opportunity to say an uplifting word to Mrs. Amherst.
The Reverend Ernest Lynde, who was a young man, with more zeal than experience, deemed it his duty to obey this injunction to the letter; but hitherto he had had to content himself with a talk with the housekeeper, or a brief word on the doorstep from Wyant. Today, however, he had asked somewhat insistently for Miss Brent; and Justine, who was free at the moment, felt that she could not refuse to go down. She had seen him only in the pulpit, when once or twice, in Bessy's absence, she had taken Cicely to church: he struck her as a grave young man, with a fine voice but halting speech. His sermons were earnest but ineffective.
As he rose to meet her, she felt that she should like him better out of church. His glance was clear and honest, and there was sweetness in his hesitating smile.
I am sorry to seem persistent--but I heard you had news of Mr. Langhope, and I was anxious to know the particulars, he explained.
Justine replied that her message had overtaken Mr. Langhope at Wady Haifa, and that he hoped to reach Alexandria in time to catch a steamer to Brindisi at the end of the week.
Not till then? So it will be almost three weeks--?
As nearly as I can calculate, a month.
The rector hesitated. "And Mr. Amherst?"
He is coming back too.
Ah, you have heard? I'm glad of that. He will be here soon?
No. He is in South America--at Buenos Ayres. There will be no steamer for some days, and he may not get here till after Mr. Langhope.
Mr. Lynde looked at her kindly, with grave eyes that proffered help. "This is terrible for you, Miss Brent."
Yes, Justine answered simply.
And Mrs. Amherst's condition----?
It is about the same.
The doctors are hopeful?
They have not lost hope.
She seems to keep her strength wonderfully.
Yes, wonderfully.
Mr. Lynde paused, looking downward, and awkwardly turning his soft clerical hat in his large kind-looking hands. "One might almost see in it a dispensation--_we_ should see one, Miss Brent."
_We?_ She glanced up apologetically, not quite sure that her tired mind had followed his meaning.
We, I mean, who believe...that not one sparrow falls to the ground.... He flushed, and went on in a more mundane tone: "I am glad you have the hope of Mr. Langhope's arrival to keep you up. Modern science--thank heaven!--can do such wonders in sustaining and prolonging life that, even if there is little chance of recovery, the faint spark may be nursed until...."
He paused again, conscious that the dusky-browed young woman, slenderly erect in her dark blue linen and nurse's cap, was examining him with an intentness which contrasted curiously with the absent-minded glance she had dropped on him in entering.
In such cases, she said in a low tone, "there is practically no chance of recovery."
So I understand.
Even if there were, it would probably be death-in-life: complete paralysis of the lower body.
He shuddered. "A dreadful fate! She was so gay and active----"
Yes--and the struggle with death, for the next few weeks, must involve incessant suffering...frightful suffering...perhaps vainly....
I feared so, he murmured, his kind face paling.
Then why do you thank heaven that modern science has found such wonderful ways of prolonging life?
He raised his head with a start and their eyes met. He saw that the nurse's face was pale and calm--almost judicial in its composure--and his self-possession returned to him.
As a Christian, he answered, with his slow smile, "I can hardly do otherwise."
Justine continued to consider him thoughtfully. "The men of the older generation--clergymen, I mean," she went on in a low controlled voice, "would of course take that view--must take it. But the conditions are so changed--so many undreamed-of means of prolonging life--prolonging suffering--have been discovered and applied in the last few years, that I wondered...in my profession one often wonders...."
I understand, he rejoined sympathetically, forgetting his youth and his inexperience in the simple desire to bring solace to a troubled mind. "I understand your feeling--but you need have no doubt. Human life is sacred, and the fact that, even in this materialistic age, science is continually struggling to preserve and prolong it, shows--very beautifully, I think--how all things work together to fulfill the divine will."
Then you believe that the divine will delights in mere pain--mere meaningless animal suffering--for its own sake?
Surely not; but for the sake of the spiritual life that may be mysteriously wrung out of it.
Justine bent her puzzled brows on him. "I could understand that view of moral suffering--or even of physical pain moderate enough to leave the mind clear, and to call forth qualities of endurance and renunciation. But where the body has been crushed to a pulp, and the mind is no more than a machine for the registering of sense-impressions of physical anguish, of what use can such suffering be to its owner--or to the divine will?"
The young rector looked at her sadly, almost severely. "There, Miss Brent, we touch on inscrutable things, and human reason must leave the answer to faith."
Justine pondered. "So that--one may say--Christianity recognizes no exceptions--?"
None--none, its authorized exponent pronounced emphatically.
Then Christianity and science are agreed. She rose, and the young rector, with visible reluctance, stood up also.
That, again, is one of the most striking evidences-- he began; and then, as the necessity of taking leave was forced upon him, he added appealingly: "I understand your uncertainties, your questionings, and I wish I could have made my point clearer----"
Thank you; it is quite clear. The reasons, of course, are different; but the result is exactly the same.
She held out her hand, smiling sadly on him, and with a sudden return of youth and self-consciousness, he murmured shyly: "I feel for you"--the man in him yearning over her loneliness, though the pastor dared not press his help....
THAT evening, when Justine took her place at the bedside, and the other two nurses had gone down to supper, Bessy turned her head slightly, resting her eyes on her friend.
The rose-shaded lamp cast a tint of life on her face, and the dark circles of pain made her eyes look deeper and brighter. Justine was almost deceived by the delusive semblance of vitality, and a hope that was half anguish stirred in her. She sat down by the bed, clasping the hand on the sheet.
You feel better tonight?
I breathe...better.... The words came brokenly, between long pauses, but without the hard agonized gasps of the previous night.
That's a good sign. Justine paused, and then, letting her fingers glide once or twice over the back of Bessy's hand--"You know, dear, Mr. Amherst is coming," she leaned down to say.
Bessy's eyes moved again, slowly, inscrutably. She had never asked for her husband.
Soon? she whispered.
He had started on a long journey--to out-of-the-way places--to study something about cotton growing--my message has just overtaken him, Justine explained.
Bessy lay still, her breast straining for breath. She remained so long without speaking that Justine began to think she was falling back into the somnolent state that intervened between her moments of complete consciousness. But at length she lifted her lids again, and her lips stirred.
He will be...long...coming?
Some days.
How...many?
We can't tell yet.
Silence again. Bessy's features seemed to shrink into a kind of waxen quietude--as though her face were seen under clear water, a long way down. And then, as she lay thus, without sound or movement, two tears forced themselves through her lashes and rolled down her cheeks.
Justine, bending close, wiped them away. "Bessy--"
The wet lashes were raised--an anguished look met her gaze.
I--I can't bear it....
What, dear?
The pain.... Shan't I die...before?
You may get well, Bessy.
Justine felt her hand quiver. "Walk again...?"
Perhaps...not that.
_This?_ I can't bear it.... Her head drooped sideways, turning away toward the wall.
Justine, that night, kept her vigil with an aching heart. The news of Amherst's return had produced no sign of happiness in his wife--- the tears had been forced from her merely by the dread of being kept alive during the long days of pain before he came. The medical explanation might have been that repeated crises of intense physical anguish, and the deep lassitude succeeding them, had so overlaid all other feelings, or at least so benumbed their expression, that it was impossible to conjecture how Bessy's little half-smothered spark of soul had really been affected by the news. But Justine did not believe in this argument. Her experience among the sick had convinced her, on the contrary, that the shafts of grief or joy will find a crack in the heaviest armour of physical pain, that the tiniest gleam of hope will light up depths of mental inanition, and somehow send a ray to the surface.... It was true that Bessy had never known how to bear pain, and that her own sensations had always formed the centre of her universe--yet, for that very reason, if the thought of seeing Amherst had made her happier it would have lifted, at least momentarily, the weight of death from her body.
Justine, at first, had almost feared the contrary effect--feared that the moral depression might show itself in a lowering of physical resistance. But the body kept up its obstinate struggle against death, drawing strength from sources of vitality unsuspected in that frail envelope. The surgeon's report the next day was more favourable, and every day won from death pointed now to a faint chance of recovery.
Such at least was Wyant's view. Dr. Garford and the consulting surgeons had not yet declared themselves; but the young doctor, strung to the highest point of watchfulness, and constantly in attendance on the patient, was tending toward a hopeful prognosis. The growing conviction spurred him to fresh efforts; at Dr. Garford's request, he had temporarily handed over his Clifton practice to a young New York doctor in need of change, and having installed himself at Lynbrook he gave up his days and nights to Mrs. Amherst's case.
If any one can save her, Wyant will, Dr. Garford had declared to Justine, when, on the tenth day after the accident, the surgeons held their third consultation. Dr. Garford reserved his own judgment. He had seen cases--they had all seen cases...but just at present the signs might point either way.... Meanwhile Wyant's confidence was an invaluable asset toward the patient's chances of recovery. Hopefulness in the physician was almost as necessary as in the patient--contact with such faith had been known to work miracles.
Justine listened in silence, wishing that she too could hope. But whichever way the prognosis pointed, she felt only a dull despair. She believed no more than Dr. Garford in the chance of recovery--that conviction seemed to her a mirage of Wyant's imagination, of his boyish ambition to achieve the impossible--and every hopeful symptom pointed, in her mind, only to a longer period of useless suffering.
Her hours at Bessy's side deepened her revolt against the energy spent in the fight with death. Since Bessy had learned that her husband was returning she had never, by sign or word, reverted to the fact. Except for a gleam of tenderness, now and then, when Cicely was brought to her, she seemed to have sunk back into herself, as though her poor little flicker of consciousness were wholly centred in the contemplation of its pain. It was not that her mind was clouded--only that it was immersed, absorbed, in that dread mystery of disproportionate anguish which a capricious fate had laid on it.... And what if she recovered, as they called it? If the flood-tide of pain should ebb, leaving her stranded, a helpless wreck on the desert shores of inactivity? What would life be to Bessy without movement? Thought would never set her blood flowing--motion, in her, could only take the form of the physical processes. Her love for Amherst was dead--even if it flickered into life again, it could but put the spark to smouldering discords and resentments; and would her one uncontaminated sentiment--her affection for Cicely--suffice to reconcile her to the desolate half-life which was the utmost that science could hold out?
Here again, Justine's experience answered no. She did not believe in Bessy's powers of moral recuperation--her body seemed less near death than her spirit. Life had been poured out to her in generous measure, and she had spilled the precious draught--the few drops remaining in the cup could no longer renew her strength.
Pity, not condemnation--profound illimitable pity--flowed from this conclusion of Justine's. To a compassionate heart there could be no sadder instance of the wastefulness of life than this struggle of the small half-formed soul with a destiny too heavy for its strength. If Bessy had had any moral hope to fight for, every pang of suffering would have been worth enduring; but it was intolerable to witness the spectacle of her useless pain.
Incessant commerce with such thoughts made Justine, as the days passed, crave any escape from solitude, any contact with other ideas. Even the reappearance of Westy Gaines, bringing a breath of common-place conventional grief into the haunted silence of the house, was a respite from her questionings. If it was hard to talk to him, to answer his enquiries, to assent to his platitudes, it was harder, a thousand times, to go on talking to herself....
Mr. Tredegar's coming was a distinct relief. His dryness was like cautery to her wound. Mr. Tredegar undoubtedly grieved for Bessy; but his grief struck inward, exuding only now and then, through the fissures of his hard manner, in a touch of extra solemnity, the more laboured rounding of a period. Yet, on the whole, it was to his feeling that Justine felt her own to be most akin. If his stoic acceptance of the inevitable proceeded from the resolve to spare himself pain, that at least was a form of strength, an indication of character. She had never cared for the fluencies of invertebrate sentiment.
Now, on the evening of the day after her talk with Bessy, it was more than ever a solace to escape from the torment of her thoughts into the rarefied air of Mr. Tredegar's presence. The day had been a bad one for the patient, and Justine's distress had been increased by the receipt of a cable from Mr. Langhope, announcing that, owing to delay in reaching Brindisi, he had missed the fast steamer from Cherbourg, and would not arrive till four or five days later than he had expected. Mr. Tredegar, in response to her report, had announced his intention of coming down by a late train, and now he and Justine and Dr. Wyant, after dining together, were seated before the fire in the smoking-room.
I take it, then, Mr. Tredegar said, turning to Wyant, "that the chances of her living to see her father are very slight."
The young doctor raised his head eagerly. "Not in my opinion, sir. Unless unforeseen complications arise, I can almost promise to keep her alive for another month--I'm not afraid to call it six weeks!"
H'm--Garford doesn't say so.
No; Dr. Garford argues from precedent.
And you? Mr. Tredegar's thin lips were visited by the ghost of a smile.
Oh, I don't argue--I just feel my way, said Wyant imperturbably.
And yet you don't hesitate to predict----
No, I don't, sir; because the case, as I see it, presents certain definite indications. He began to enumerate them, cleverly avoiding the use of technicalities and trying to make his point clear by the use of simple illustration and analogy. It sickened Justine to listen to his passionate exposition--she had heard it so often, she believed in it so little.
Mr. Tredegar turned a probing glance on him as he ended. "Then, today even, you believe not only in the possibility of prolonging life, but of ultimate recovery?"
Wyant hesitated. "I won't call it recovery--today. Say--life indefinitely prolonged."
And the paralysis?
It might disappear--after a few months--or a few years.
Such an outcome would be unusual?
Exceptional. But then there _are_ exceptions. And I'm straining every nerve to make this one!
And the suffering--such as today's, for instance--is unavoidable?
Unhappily.
And bound to increase?
Well--as the an?sthetics lose their effect....
There was a tap on the door, and one of the nurses entered to report to Wyant. He went out with her, and Justine was left with Mr. Tredegar.
He turned to her thoughtfully. "That young fellow seems sure of himself. You believe in him?"
Justine hesitated. "Not in his expectation of recovery--no one does."
But you think they can keep the poor child alive till Langhope and her husband get back?
There was a moment's pause; then Justine murmured: "It can be done...I think...."
Yes--it's horrible, said Mr. Tredegar suddenly, as if in answer to her thought.
She looked up in surprise, and saw his eye resting on her with what seemed like a mist of sympathy on its vitreous surface. Her lips trembled, parting as if for speech--but she looked away without answering.
These new devices for keeping people alive, Mr. Tredegar continued; "they increase the suffering besides prolonging it?"
Yes--in some cases.
In this case?
I am afraid so.
The lawyer drew out his fine cambric handkerchief, and furtively wiped a slight dampness from his forehead. "I wish to God she had been killed!" he said.
Justine lifted her head again, with an answering exclamation. "Oh, yes!"
It's infernal--the time they can make it last.
It's useless! Justine broke out.
Useless? He turned his critical glance on her. "Well, that's beside the point--since it's inevitable."
She wavered a moment--but his words had loosened the bonds about her heart, and she could not check herself so suddenly. "Why inevitable?"
Mr. Tredegar looked at her in surprise, as though wondering at so unprofessional an utterance from one who, under ordinary circumstances, showed the absolute self-control and submission of the well-disciplined nurse.
Human life is sacred, he said sententiously.
Ah, that must have been decreed by some one who had never suffered! Justine exclaimed.
Mr. Tredegar smiled compassionately: he evidently knew how to make allowances for the fact that she was overwrought by the sight of her friend's suffering: "Society decreed it--not one person," he corrected.
Society--science--religion! she murmured, as if to herself.
Precisely. It's the universal consensus--the result of the world's accumulated experience. Cruel in individual instances--necessary for the general welfare. Of course your training has taught you all this; but I can understand that at such a time....
Yes, she said, rising wearily as Wyant came in.
* * * * *
Her worst misery, now, was to have to discuss Bessy's condition with Wyant. To the young physician Bessy was no longer a suffering, agonizing creature: she was a case--a beautiful case. As the problem developed new intricacies, becoming more and more of a challenge to his faculties of observation and inference, Justine saw the abstract scientific passion supersede his personal feeling of pity. Though his professional skill made him exquisitely tender to the patient under his hands, he seemed hardly conscious that she was a woman who had befriended him, and whom he had so lately seen in the brightness of health and enjoyment. This view was normal enough--it was, as Justine knew, the ideal state of mind for the successful physician, in whom sympathy for the patient as an individual must often impede swift choice and unfaltering action. But what she shrank from was his resolve to save Bessy's life--a resolve fortified to the point of exasperation by the scepticism of the consulting surgeons, who saw in it only the youngster's natural desire to distinguish himself by performing a feat which his elders deemed impossible.
As the days dragged on, and Bessy's sufferings increased, Justine longed for a protesting word from Dr. Garford or one of his colleagues. In her hospital experience she had encountered cases where the useless agonies of death were mercifully shortened by the physician; why was not this a case for such treatment? The answer was simple enough--in the first place, it was the duty of the surgeons to keep their patient alive till her husband and her father could reach her; and secondly, there was that faint illusive hope of so-called recovery, in which none of them believed, yet which they could not ignore in their treatment. The evening after Mr. Tredegar's departure Wyant was setting this forth at great length to Justine. Bessy had had a bad morning: the bronchial symptoms which had developed a day or two before had greatly increased her distress, and there had been, at dawn, a moment of weakness when it seemed that some pitiful power was about to defeat the relentless efforts of science. But Wyant had fought off the peril. By the prompt and audacious use of stimulants--by a rapid marshalling of resources, a display of self-reliance and authority, which Justine could not but admire as she mechanically seconded his efforts--the spark of life had been revived, and Bessy won back for fresh suffering.
Yes--I say it can be done: tonight I say it more than ever, Wyant exclaimed, pushing the disordered hair from his forehead, and leaning toward Justine across the table on which their brief evening meal had been served. "I say the way the heart has rallied proves that we've got more strength to draw on than any of them have been willing to admit. The breathing's better too. If we can fight off the degenerative processes--and, by George, I believe we can!" He looked up suddenly at Justine. "With you to work with, I believe I could do anything. How you do back a man up! You think with your hands--with every individual finger!"
Justine turned her eyes away: she felt a shudder of repulsion steal over her tired body. It was not that she detected any note of personal admiration in his praise--he had commended her as the surgeon might commend a fine instrument fashioned for his use. But that she should be the instrument to serve such a purpose--that her skill, her promptness, her gift of divining and interpreting the will she worked with, should be at the service of this implacable scientific passion! Ah, no--she could be silent no longer....
She looked up at Wyant, and their eyes met.
Why do you do it? she asked.
He stared, as if thinking that she referred to some special point in his treatment. "Do what?"
It's so useless...you all know she must die.
I know nothing of the kind...and even the others are not so sure today. He began to go over it all again--repeating his arguments, developing new theories, trying to force into her reluctant mind his own faith in the possibility of success.
* * * * *
Justine sat resting her chin on her clasped hands, her eyes gazing straight before her under dark tormented brows. When he paused she remained silent.
Well--don't you believe me? he broke out with sudden asperity.
I don't know...I can't tell....
But as long as there's a doubt, even--a doubt my way--and I'll show you there is, if you'll give me time----
How much time? she murmured, without shifting her gaze.
Ah--that depends on ourselves: on you and me chiefly. That's what Garford admits. _They_ can't do much now--they've got to leave the game to us. It's a question of incessant vigilance...of utilizing every hour, every moment.... Time's all I ask, and _you_ can give it to me, if any one can!
Under the challenge of his tone Justine rose to her feet with a low murmur of fear. "Ah, don't ask me!"
Don't ask you----?
I can't--I can't.
Wyant stood up also, turning on her an astonished glance.
You can't what--?
Their eyes met, and she thought she read in his a sudden divination of her inmost thoughts. The discovery electrified her flagging strength, restoring her to immediate clearness of brain. She saw the gulf of self-betrayal over which she had hung, and the nearness of the peril nerved her to a last effort of dissimulation.
I can't...talk of it...any longer, she faltered, letting her tears flow, and turning on him a face of pure womanly weakness.
Wyant looked at her without answering. Did he distrust even these plain physical evidences of exhaustion, or was he merely disappointed in her, as in one whom he had believed to be above the emotional failings of her sex?
You're over-tired, he said coldly. "Take tonight to rest. Miss Mace can replace you for the next few hours--and I may need you more tomorrow."
FOUR more days had passed. Bessy seldom spoke when Justine was with her. She was wrapped in a thickening cloud of opiates--morphia by day, bromides, sulphonal, chloral hydrate at night. When the cloud broke and consciousness emerged, it was centred in the one acute point of bodily anguish. Darting throes of neuralgia, agonized oppression of the breath, the diffused misery of the whole helpless body--these were reducing their victim to a mere instrument on which pain played its incessant deadly variations. Once or twice she turned her dull eyes on Justine, breathing out: "I want to die," as some inevitable lifting or readjusting thrilled her body with fresh pangs; but there were no signs of contact with the outer world--she had ceased even to ask for Cicely....
And yet, according to the doctors, the patient held her own. Certain alarming symptoms had diminished, and while others persisted, the strength to fight them persisted too. With such strength to call on, what fresh agonies were reserved for the poor body when the narcotics had lost their power?
That was the question always before Justine. She never again betrayed her fears to Wyant--she carried out his orders with morbid precision, trembling lest any failure in efficiency should revive his suspicions. She hardly knew what she feared his suspecting--she only had a confused sense that they were enemies, and that she was the weaker of the two.
And then the an?sthetics began to fail. It was the sixteenth day since the accident, and the resources of alleviation were almost exhausted. It was not sure, even now, that Bessy was going to die--and she was certainly going to suffer a long time. Wyant seemed hardly conscious of the increase of pain--his whole mind was fixed on the prognosis. What matter if the patient suffered, as long as he proved his case? That, of course, was not his way of putting it. In reality, he did all he could to allay the pain, surpassed himself in new devices and experiments. But death confronted him implacably, claiming his due: so many hours robbed from him, so much tribute to pay; and Wyant, setting his teeth, fought on--and Bessy paid.
* * * * *
Justine had begun to notice that it was hard for her to get a word alone with Dr. Garford. The other nurses were not in the way--it was Wyant who always contrived to be there. Perhaps she was unreasonable in seeing a special intention in his presence: it was natural enough that the two persons in charge of the case should confer together with their chief. But his persistence annoyed her, and she was glad when, one afternoon, the surgeon asked him to telephone an important message to town.
As soon as the door had closed, Justine said to Dr. Garford: "She is beginning to suffer terribly."
He answered with the large impersonal gesture of the man to whom physical suffering has become a painful general fact of life, no longer divisible into individual cases. "We are doing all we can."
Yes. She paused, and then raised her eyes to his dry kind face. "Is there any hope?"
Another gesture--the fatalistic sweep of the lifted palms. "The next ten days will tell--the fight is on, as Wyant says. And if any one can do it, that young fellow can. There's stuff in him--and infernal ambition."
Yes: but do _you_ believe she can live--?
Dr. Garford smiled indulgently on such unprofessional insistence; but she was past wondering what they must all think of her.
My dear Miss Brent, he said, "I have reached the age when one always leaves a door open to the unexpected."
As he spoke, a slight sound at her back made her turn. Wyant was behind her--he must have entered as she put her question. And he certainly could not have had time to descend the stairs, walk the length of the house, ring up New York, and deliver Dr Garford's message.... The same thought seemed to strike the surgeon. "Hello, Wyant?" he said.
Line busy, said Wyant curtly.
* * * * *
About this time, Justine gave up her night vigils. She could no longer face the struggle of the dawn hour, when life ebbs lowest; and since her duties extended beyond the sick-room she could fairly plead that she was more needed about the house by day. But Wyant protested: he wanted her most at the difficult hour.
You know you're taking a chance from her, he said, almost sternly.
Oh, no----
He looked at her searchingly. "You don't feel up to it?"
No.
He turned away with a slight shrug; but she knew he resented her defection.
The day watches were miserable enough. It was the nineteenth day now; and Justine lay on the sofa in Amherst's sitting-room, trying to nerve herself for the nurse's summons. A page torn out of the calendar lay before her--she had been calculating again how many days must elapse before Mr. Langhope could arrive. Ten days--ten days and ten nights! And the length of the nights was double.... As for Amherst, it was impossible to set a date for his coming, for his steamer from Buenos Ayres called at various ports on the way northward, and the length of her stay at each was dependent on the delivery of freight, and on the dilatoriness of the South American official.
She threw down the calendar and leaned back, pressing her hands to her temples. Oh, for a word with Amherst--he alone would have understood what she was undergoing! Mr. Langhope's coming would make no difference--or rather, it would only increase the difficulty of the situation. Instinctively Justine felt that, though his heart would be wrung by the sight of Bessy's pain, his cry would be the familiar one, the traditional one: _Keep her alive!_ Under his surface originality, his verbal audacities and ironies, Mr. Langhope was the creature of accepted forms, inherited opinions: he had never really thought for himself on any of the pressing problems of life.
But Amherst was different. Close contact with many forms of wretchedness had freed him from the bondage of accepted opinion. He looked at life through no eyes but his own; and what he saw, he confessed to seeing. He never tried to evade the consequences of his discoveries.
Justine's remembrance flew back to their first meeting at Hanaford, when his confidence in his own powers was still unshaken, his trust in others unimpaired. And, gradually, she began to relive each detail of their talk at Dillon's bedside--her first impression of him, as he walked down the ward; the first sound of his voice; her surprised sense of his authority; her almost involuntary submission to his will.... Then her thoughts passed on to their walk home from the hospital--she recalled his sober yet unsparing summary of the situation at Westmore, and the note of insight with which he touched on the hardships of the workers.... Then, word by word, their talk about Dillon came back...Amherst's indignation and pity...his shudder of revolt at the man's doom.
_In your work, don't you ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?_ And then, after her conventional murmur of protest: "_To save what, when all the good of life is gone?_"
To distract her thoughts she stretched her hand toward the book-case, taking out the first volume in reach--the little copy of Bacon. She leaned back, fluttering its pages aimlessly--so wrapped in her own misery that the meaning of the words could not reach her. It was useless to try to read: every perception of the outer world was lost in the hum of inner activity that made her mind like a forge throbbing with heat and noise. But suddenly her glance fell on some pencilled sentences on the fly-leaf. They were in Amherst's hand, and the sight arrested her as though she had heard him speak.
_La vraie morale se moque de la morale...._
_We perish because we follow other men's examples...._
_Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of Lami?--bugbears to frighten children...._
A rush of air seemed to have been let into her stifled mind. Were they his own thoughts? No--her memory recalled some confused association with great names. But at least they must represent his beliefs--must embody deeply-felt convictions--or he would scarcely have taken the trouble to record them.
She murmured over the last sentence once or twice: _The opinions of the many--bugbears to frighten children...._ Yes, she had often heard him speak of current judgments in that way...she had never known a mind so free from the spell of the Lami?.
* * * * *
Some one knocked, and she put aside the book and rose to her feet. It was a maid bringing a note from Wyant.
There has been a motor accident beyond Clifton, and I have been sent for. I think I can safely be away for two or three hours, but ring me up at Clifton if you want me. Miss Mace has instructions, and Garford's assistant will be down at seven.
She looked at the clock: it was just three, the hour at which she was to relieve Miss Mace. She smoothed the hair from her forehead, straightened her cap, tied on the apron she had laid aside....
As she entered Bessy's sitting-room the nurse came out, memoranda in hand. The two moved to the window for a moment's conference, and as the wintry light fell on Miss Mace's face, Justine saw that it was white with fatigue.
You're ill! she exclaimed.
The nurse shook her head. "No--but it's awful...this afternoon...." Her glance turned to the sick-room.
Go and rest--I'll stay till bedtime, Justine said.
Miss Safford's down with another headache.
I know: it doesn't matter. I'm quite fresh.
You _do_ look rested! the other exclaimed, her eyes lingering enviously on Justine's face.
She stole away, and Justine entered the room. It was true that she felt fresh--a new spring of hope had welled up in her. She had her nerves in hand again, she had regained her steady vision of life....
But in the room, as the nurse had said, it was awful. The time had come when the effect of the an?sthetics must be carefully husbanded, when long intervals of pain must purchase the diminishing moments of relief. Yet from Wyant's standpoint it was a good day--things were looking well, as he would have phrased it. And each day now was a fresh victory.
Justine went through her task mechanically. The glow of strength and courage remained, steeling her to bear what had broken down Miss Mace's professional fortitude. But when she sat down by the bed Bessy's moaning began to wear on her. It was no longer the utterance of human pain, but the monotonous whimper of an animal--the kind of sound that a compassionate hand would instinctively crush into silence. But her hand had other duties; she must keep watch on pulse and heart, must reinforce their action with the tremendous stimulants which Wyant was now using, and, having revived fresh sensibility to pain, must presently try to allay it by the cautious use of narcotics.
It was all simple enough--but suppose she should not do it? Suppose she left the stimulants untouched? Wyant was absent, one nurse exhausted with fatigue, the other laid low by headache. Justine had the field to herself. For three hours at least no one was likely to cross the threshold of the sick-room.... Ah, if no more time were needed! But there was too much life in Bessy--her youth was fighting too hard for her! She would not sink out of life in three hours...and Justine could not count on more than that.
She looked at the little travelling-clock on the dressing-table, and saw that its hands marked four. An hour had passed already.... She rose and administered the prescribed restorative; then she took the pulse, and listened to the beat of the heart. Strong still--too strong!
As she lifted her head, the vague animal wailing ceased, and she heard her name: "Justine----"
She bent down eagerly. "Yes?"
No answer: the wailing had begun again. But the one word showed her that the mind still lived in its torture-house, that the poor powerless body before her was not yet a mere bundle of senseless reflexes, but her friend Bessy Amherst, dying, and feeling herself die....
Justine reseated herself, and the vigil began again. The second hour ebbed slowly--ah, no, it was flying now! Her eyes were on the hands of the clock and they seemed leagued against her to devour the precious minutes. And now she could see by certain spasmodic symptoms that another crisis of pain was approaching--one of the struggles that Wyant, at times, had almost seemed to court and exult in.
Bessy's eyes turned on her again. "_Justine_----"
She knew what that meant: it was an appeal for the hypodermic needle. The little instrument lay at hand, beside a newly-filled bottle of morphia. But she must wait--must let the pain grow more severe. Yet she could not turn her gaze from Bessy, and Bessy's eyes entreated her again--_Justine_! There was really no word now--the whimperings were uninterrupted. But Justine heard an inner voice, and its pleading shook her heart. She rose and filled the syringe--and returning with it, bent above the bed....
* * * * *
She lifted her head and looked at the clock. The second hour had passed. As she looked, she heard a step in the sitting-room. Who could it be? Not Dr. Garford's assistant--he was not due till seven. She listened again.... One of the nurses? No, not a woman's step----
The door opened, and Wyant came in. Justine stood by the bed without moving toward him. He paused also, as if surprised to see her there motionless. In the intense silence she fancied for a moment that she heard Bessy's violent agonized breathing. She tried to speak, to drown the sound of the breathing; but her lips trembled too much, and she remained silent.
Wyant seemed to hear nothing. He stood so still that she felt she must move forward. As she did so, she picked up from the table by the bed the memoranda that it was her duty to submit to him.
Well? he said, in the familiar sick-room whisper.
She is dead.
He fell back a step, glaring at her, white and incredulous.
_Dead?_--When----?
A few minutes ago....
_Dead--?_ It's not possible!
He swept past her, shouldering her aside, pushing in an electric button as he sprang to the bed. She perceived then that the room had been almost in darkness. She recovered command of herself, and followed him. He was going through the usual rapid examination--pulse, heart, breath--hanging over the bed like some angry animal balked of its prey. Then he lifted the lids and bent close above the eyes.
Take the shade off that lamp! he commanded.
Justine obeyed him.
He stooped down again to examine the eyes...he remained stooping a long time. Suddenly he stood up and faced her.
Had she been in great pain?
Yes.
Worse than usual?
Yes.
What had you done?
Nothing--there was no time.
No time? He broke off to sweep the room again with his excited incredulous glance. "Where are the others? Why were you here alone?" he demanded.
It came suddenly. I was going to call----
Their eyes met for a moment. Her face was perfectly calm--she could feel that her lips no longer trembled. She was not in the least afraid of Wyant's scrutiny.
As he continued to look at her, his expression slowly passed from incredulous wrath to something softer--more human--she could not tell what....
This has been too much for you--go and send one of the others.... It's all over, he said.
ON a September day, somewhat more than a year and a half after Bessy Amherst's death, her husband and his mother sat at luncheon in the dining-room of the Westmore house at Hanaford.
The house was John Amherst's now, and shortly after the loss of his wife he had established himself there with his mother. By a will made some six months before her death, Bessy had divided her estate between her husband and daughter, placing Cicely's share in trust, and appointing Mr. Langhope and Amherst as her guardians. As the latter was also her trustee, the whole management of the estate devolved on him, while his control of the Westmore mills was ensured by his receiving a slightly larger proportion of the stock than his step-daughter.
The will had come as a surprise, not only to Amherst himself, but to his wife's family, and more especially to her legal adviser. Mr. Tredegar had in fact had nothing to do with the drawing of the instrument; but as it had been drawn in due form, and by a firm of excellent standing, he was obliged, in spite of his private views, and Mr. Langhope's open adjurations that he should "do something," to declare that there was no pretext for questioning the validity of the document.
To Amherst the will was something more than a proof of his wife's confidence: it came as a reconciling word from her grave. For the date showed that it had been made at a moment when he supposed himself to have lost all influence over her--on the morrow of the day when she had stipulated that he should give up the management of the Westmore mills, and yield the care of her property to Mr. Tredegar.
While she smote him with one hand, she sued for pardon with the other; and the contradiction was so characteristic, it explained and excused in so touching a way the inconsistencies of her impulsive heart and hesitating mind, that he was filled with that tender compunction, that searching sense of his own shortcomings, which generous natures feel when they find they have underrated the generosity of others. But Amherst's was not an introspective mind, and his sound moral sense told him, when the first pang of self-reproach had subsided, that he had done his best by his wife, and was in no way to blame if her recognition of the fact had come too late. The self-reproach subsided; and, instead of the bitterness of the past, it left a softened memory which made him take up his task with the sense that he was now working with Bessy and not against her.
Yet perhaps, after all, it was chiefly the work itself which had healed old wounds, and quelled the tendency to vain regrets. Amherst was only thirty-four; and in the prime of his energies the task he was made for had been given back to him. To a sound nature, which finds its outlet in fruitful action, nothing so simplifies the complexities of life, so tends to a large acceptance of its vicissitudes and mysteries, as the sense of doing something each day toward clearing one's own bit of the wilderness. And this was the joy at last conceded to Amherst. The mills were virtually his; and the fact that he ruled them not only in his own right but as Cicely's representative, made him doubly eager to justify his wife's trust in him.
Mrs. Amherst, looking up from a telegram which the parlour-maid had handed her, smiled across the table at her son.
From Maria Ansell--they are all coming tomorrow.
Ah--that's good, Amherst rejoined. "I should have been sorry if Cicely had not been here."
Mr. Langhope is coming too, his mother continued. "I'm glad of that, John."
Yes, Amherst again assented.
The morrow was to be a great day at Westmore. The Emergency Hospital, planned in the first months of his marriage, and abandoned in the general reduction of expenditure at the mills, had now been completed on a larger and more elaborate scale, as a memorial to Bessy. The strict retrenchment of all personal expenses, and the leasing of Lynbrook and the town house, had enabled Amherst, in eighteen months, to lay by enough income to carry out this plan, which he was impatient to see executed as a visible commemoration of his wife's generosity to Westmore. For Amherst persisted in regarding the gift of her fortune as a gift not to himself but to the mills: he looked on himself merely as the agent of her beneficent intentions. He was anxious that Westmore and Hanaford should take the same view; and the opening of the Westmore Memorial Hospital was therefore to be performed with an unwonted degree of ceremony.
I am glad Mr. Langhope is coming, Mrs. Amherst repeated, as they rose from the table. "It shows, dear--doesn't it?--that he's really gratified--that he appreciates your motive...."
She raised a proud glance to her tall son, whose head seemed to tower higher than ever above her small proportions. Renewed self-confidence, and the habit of command, had in fact restored the erectness to Amherst's shoulders and the clearness to his eyes. The cleft between the brows was gone, and his veiled inward gaze had given place to a glance almost as outward-looking and unspeculative as his mother's.
It shows--well, yes--what you say! he rejoined with a slight laugh, and a tap on her shoulder as she passed.
He was under no illusions as to his father-in-law's attitude: he knew that Mr. Langhope would willingly have broken the will which deprived his grand-daughter of half her inheritance, and that his subsequent show of friendliness was merely a concession to expediency. But in his present mood Amherst almost believed that time and closer relations might turn such sentiments into honest liking. He was very fond of his little step-daughter, and deeply sensible of his obligations toward her; and he hoped that, as Mr. Langhope came to recognize this, it might bring about a better understanding between them.
His mother detained him. "You're going back to the mills at once? I wanted to consult you about the rooms. Miss Brent had better be next to Cicely?"
I suppose so--yes. I'll see you before I go. He nodded affectionately and passed on, his hands full of papers, into the Oriental smoking-room, now dedicated to the unexpected uses of an office and study.
Mrs. Amherst, as she turned away, found the parlour-maid in the act of opening the front door to the highly-tinted and well-dressed figure of Mrs. Harry Dressel.
I'm so delighted to hear that you're expecting Justine, began Mrs. Dressel as the two ladies passed into the drawing-room.
Ah, you've heard too? Mrs. Amherst rejoined, enthroning her visitor in one of the monumental plush armchairs beneath the threatening weight of the Bay of Naples.
I hadn't till this moment; in fact I flew in to ask for news, and on the door-step there was such a striking-looking young man enquiring for her, and I heard the parlour-maid say she was arriving tomorrow.
A young man? Some one you didn't know? Striking apparitions of the male sex were of infrequent occurrence at Hanaford, and Mrs. Amherst's unabated interest in the movement of life caused her to dwell on this statement.
Oh, no--I'm sure he was a stranger. Extremely slight and pale, with remarkable eyes. He was so disappointed--he seemed sure of finding her.
Well, no doubt he'll come back tomorrow.--You know we're expecting the whole party, added Mrs. Amherst, to whom the imparting of good news was always an irresistible temptation.
Mrs. Dressel's interest deepened at once. "Really? Mr. Langhope too?"
Yes. It's a great pleasure to my son.
It must be! I'm so glad. I suppose in a way it will be rather sad for Mr. Langhope--seeing everything here so unchanged----
Mrs. Amherst straightened herself a little. "I think he will prefer to find it so," she said, with a barely perceptible change of tone.
Oh, I don't know. They were never very fond of this house.
There was an added note of authority in Mrs. Dressel's accent. In the last few months she had been to Europe and had had nervous prostration, and these incontestable evidences of growing prosperity could not always be kept out of her voice and bearing. At any rate, they justified her in thinking that her opinion on almost any subject within the range of human experience was a valuable addition to the sum-total of wisdom; and unabashed by the silence with which her comment was received, she continued her critical survey of the drawing-room.
Dear Mrs. Amherst--you know I can't help saying what I think--and I've so often wondered why you don't do this room over. With these high ceilings you could do something lovely in Louis Seize.
A faint pink rose to Mrs. Amherst's cheeks. "I don't think my son would ever care to make any changes here," she said.
Oh, I understand his feeling; but when he begins to entertain--and you know poor Bessy always _hated_ this furniture.
Mrs. Amherst smiled slightly. "Perhaps if he marries again--" she said, seizing at random on a pretext for changing the subject.
Mrs. Dressel dropped the hands with which she was absent-mindedly assuring herself of the continuance of unbroken relations between her hat and her hair.
_Marries again?_ Why--you don't mean--? He doesn't think of it?
Not in the least--I spoke figuratively, her hostess rejoined with a laugh.
Oh, of course--I see. He really _couldn't_ marry, could he? I mean, it would be so wrong to Cicely--under the circumstances.
Mrs. Amherst's black eye-brows gathered in a slight frown. She had already noticed, on the part of the Hanaford clan, a disposition to regard Amherst as imprisoned in the conditions of his trust, and committed to the obligation of handing on unimpaired to Cicely the fortune his wife's caprice had bestowed on him; and this open expression of the family view was singularly displeasing to her.
I had not thought of it in that light--but it's really of no consequence how one looks at a thing that is not going to happen, she said carelessly.
No--naturally; I see you were only joking. He's so devoted to Cicely, isn't he? Mrs. Dressel rejoined, with her bright obtuseness.
A step on the threshold announced Amherst's approach.
I'm afraid I must be off, mother-- he began, halting in the doorway with the instinctive masculine recoil from the afternoon caller.
Oh, Mr. Amherst, how d'you do? I suppose you're very busy about tomorrow? I just flew in to find out if Justine was really coming, Mrs. Dressel explained, a little fluttered by the effort of recalling what she had been saying when he entered.
I believe my mother expects the whole party, Amherst replied, shaking hands with the false _bonhomie_ of the man entrapped.
How delightful! And it's so nice to think that Mr. Langhope's arrangement with Justine still works so well, Mrs. Dressel hastened on, nervously hoping that her volubility would smother any recollection of what he had chanced to overhear.
Mr. Langhope is lucky in having persuaded Miss Brent to take charge of Cicely, Mrs. Amherst quietly interposed.
Yes--and it was so lucky for Justine too! When she came back from Europe with us last autumn, I could see she simply hated the idea of taking up her nursing again.
Amherst's face darkened at the allusion, and his mother said hurriedly: "Ah, she was tired, poor child; but I'm only afraid that, after the summer's rest, she may want some more active occupation than looking after a little girl."
Oh, I think not--she's so fond of Cicely. And of course it's everything to her to have a comfortable home.
Mrs. Amherst smiled. "At her age, it's not always everything."
Mrs. Dressel stared slightly. "Oh, Justine's twenty-seven, you know; she's not likely to marry now," she said, with the mild finality of the early-wedded.
She rose as she spoke, extending cordial hands of farewell. "You must be so busy preparing for the great day...if only it doesn't rain!... No, _please_, Mr. Amherst!... It's a mere step--I'm walking...."
* * * * *
That afternoon, as Amherst walked out toward Westmore for a survey of the final preparations, he found that, among the pleasant thoughts accompanying him, one of the pleasantest was the anticipation of seeing Justine Brent.
Among the little group who were to surround him on the morrow, she was the only one discerning enough to understand what the day meant to him, or with sufficient knowledge to judge of the use he had made of his great opportunity. Even now that the opportunity had come, and all obstacles were levelled, sympathy with his work was as much lacking as ever; and only Duplain, at length reinstated as manager, really understood and shared in his aims. But Justine Brent's sympathy was of a different kind from the manager's. If less logical, it was warmer, more penetrating--like some fine imponderable fluid, so subtle that it could always find a way through the clumsy processes of human intercourse. Amherst had thought very often of this quality in her during the weeks which followed his abrupt departure for Georgia; and in trying to define it he had said to himself that she felt with her brain.
And now, aside from the instinctive understanding between them, she was set apart in his thoughts by her association with his wife's last days. On his arrival from the south he had gathered on all sides evidences of her tender devotion to Bessy: even Mr. Tredegar's chary praise swelled the general commendation. From the surgeons he heard how her unwearied skill had helped them in their fruitless efforts; poor Cicely, awed by her loss, clung to her mother's friend with childish tenacity; and the young rector of Saint Anne's, shyly acquitting himself of his visit of condolence, dwelt chiefly on the consolatory thought of Miss Brent's presence at the death-bed.
The knowledge that Justine had been with his wife till the end had, in fact, done more than anything else to soften Amherst's regrets; and he had tried to express something of this in the course of his first talk with her. Justine had given him a clear and self-possessed report of the dreadful weeks at Lynbrook; but at his first allusion to her own part in them, she shrank into a state of distress which seemed to plead with him to refrain from even the tenderest touch on her feelings. It was a peculiarity of their friendship that silence and absence had always mysteriously fostered its growth; and he now felt that her reticence deepened the understanding between them as the freest confidences might not have done.
Soon afterward, an opportune attack of nervous prostration had sent Mrs. Harry Dressel abroad; and Justine was selected as her companion. They remained in Europe for six months; and on their return Amherst learned with pleasure that Mr. Langhope had asked Miss Brent to take charge of Cicely.
Mr. Langhope's sorrow for his daughter had been aggravated by futile wrath at her unaccountable will; and the mixed sentiment thus engendered had found expression in a jealous outpouring of affection toward Cicely. He took immediate possession of the child, and in the first stages of his affliction her companionship had been really consoling. But as time passed, and the pleasant habits of years reasserted themselves, her presence became, in small unacknowledged ways, a source of domestic irritation. Nursery hours disturbed the easy routine of his household; the elderly parlour-maid who had long ruled it resented the intervention of Cicely's nurse; the little governess, involved in the dispute, broke down and had to be shipped home to Germany; a successor was hard to find, and in the interval Mr. Langhope's privacy was invaded by a stream of visiting teachers, who were always wanting to consult him about Cicely's lessons, and lay before him their tiresome complaints and perplexities. Poor Mr. Langhope found himself in the position of the mourner who, in the first fervour of bereavement, has undertaken the construction of an imposing monument without having counted the cost. He had meant that his devotion to Cicely should be a monument to his paternal grief; but the foundations were scarcely laid when he found that the funds of time and patience were almost exhausted.
Pride forbade his consigning Cicely to her step-father, though Mrs. Amherst would gladly have undertaken her care; Mrs. Ansell's migratory habits made it impossible for her to do more than intermittently hover and advise; and a new hope rose before Mr. Langhope when it occurred to him to appeal to Miss Brent.
The experiment had proved a success, and when Amherst met Justine again she had been for some months in charge of the little girl, and change and congenial occupation had restored her to a normal view of life. There was no trace in her now of the dumb misery which had haunted him at their parting; she was again the vivid creature who seemed more charged with life than any one he had ever known. The crisis through which she had passed showed itself only in a smoothing of the brow and deepening of the eyes, as though a bloom of experience had veiled without deadening the first brilliancy of youth.
As he lingered on the image thus evoked, he recalled Mrs. Dressel's words: "Justine is twenty-seven--she's not likely to marry now."
Oddly enough, he had never thought of her marrying--but now that he heard the possibility questioned, he felt a disagreeable conviction of its inevitableness. Mrs. Dressel's view was of course absurd. In spite of Justine's feminine graces, he had formerly felt in her a kind of elfin immaturity, as of a flitting Ariel with untouched heart and senses: it was only of late that she had developed the subtle quality which calls up thoughts of love. Not marry? Why, the vagrant fire had just lighted on her--and the fact that she was poor and unattached, with her own way to make, and no setting of pleasure and elegance to embellish her--these disadvantages seemed as nothing to Amherst against the warmth of personality in which she moved. And besides, she would never be drawn to the kind of man who needed fine clothes and luxury to point him to the charm of sex. She was always finished and graceful in appearance, with the pretty woman's art of wearing her few plain dresses as if they were many and varied; yet no one could think of her as attaching much importance to the upholstery of life.... No, the man who won her would be of a different type, have other inducements to offer...and Amherst found himself wondering just what those inducements would be.
Suddenly he remembered something his mother had said as he left the house--something about a distinguished-looking young man who had called to ask for Miss Brent. Mrs. Amherst, innocently inquisitive in small matters, had followed her son into the hall to ask the parlour-maid if the gentleman had left his name; and the parlour-maid had answered in the negative. The young man was evidently not indigenous: all the social units of Hanaford were intimately known to each other. He was a stranger, therefore, presumably drawn there by the hope of seeing Miss Brent. But if he knew that she was coming he must be intimately acquainted with her movements.... The thought came to Amherst as an unpleasant surprise. It showed him for the first time how little he knew of Justine's personal life, of the ties she might have formed outside the Lynbrook circle. After all, he had seen her chiefly not among her own friends but among his wife's. Was it reasonable to suppose that a creature of her keen individuality would be content to subsist on the fringe of other existences? Somewhere, of course, she must have a centre of her own, must be subject to influences of which he was wholly ignorant. And since her departure from Lynbrook he had known even less of her life. She had spent the previous winter with Mr. Langhope in New York, where Amherst had seen her only on his rare visits to Cicely; and Mr. Langhope, on going abroad for the summer, had established his grand-daughter in a Bar Harbour cottage, where, save for two flying visits from Mrs. Ansell, Miss Brent had reigned alone till his return in September.
Very likely, Amherst reflected, the mysterious visitor was a Bar Harbour acquaintance--no, more than an acquaintance: a friend. And as Mr. Langhope's party had left Mount Desert but three days previously, the arrival of the unknown at Hanaford showed a singular impatience to rejoin Miss Brent.
As he reached this point in his meditations, Amherst found himself at the street-corner where it was his habit to pick up the Westmore trolley. Just as it bore down on him, and he sprang to the platform, another car, coming in from the mills, stopped to discharge its passengers. Among them Amherst noticed a slender undersized man in shabby clothes, about whose retreating back, as he crossed the street to signal a Station Avenue car, there was something dimly familiar, and suggestive of troubled memories. Amherst leaned out and looked again: yes, the back was certainly like Dr. Wyant's--but what could Wyant be doing at Hanaford, and in a Westmore car?
Amherst's first impulse was to spring out and overtake him. He knew how admirably the young physician had borne himself at Lynbrook; he even recalled Dr. Garford's saying, with his kindly sceptical smile: "Poor Wyant believed to the end that we could save her"--and felt again his own inward movement of thankfulness that the cruel miracle had not been worked.
He owed a great deal to Wyant, and had tried to express his sense of the fact by warm words and a liberal fee; but since Bessy's death he had never returned to Lynbrook, and had consequently lost sight of the young doctor.
Now he felt that he ought to try to rejoin him, to find out why he was at Hanaford, and make some proffer of hospitality; but if the stranger were really Wyant, his choice of the Station Avenue car made it appear that he was on his way to catch the New York express; and in any case Amherst's engagements at Westmore made immediate pursuit impossible.
He consoled himself with the thought that if the physician was not leaving Hanaford he would be certain to call at the house; and then his mind flew back to Justine Brent. But the pleasure of looking forward to her arrival was disturbed by new feelings. A sense of reserve and embarrassment had sprung up in his mind, checking that free mental communion which, as he now perceived, had been one of the unconscious promoters of their friendship. It was as though his thoughts faced a stranger instead of the familiar presence which had so long dwelt in them; and he began to see that the feeling of intelligence existing between Justine and himself was not the result of actual intimacy, but merely of the charm she knew how to throw over casual intercourse.
When he had left his house, his mind was like a summer sky, all open blue and sunlit rolling clouds; but gradually the clouds had darkened and massed themselves, till they drew an impenetrable veil over the upper light and stretched threateningly across his whole horizon.
THE celebrations at Westmore were over. Hanaford society, mustering for the event, had streamed through the hospital, inspected the clinic, complimented Amherst, recalled itself to Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell, and streamed out again to regain its carriages and motors.
The chief actors in the ceremony were also taking leave. Mr. Langhope, somewhat pale and nervous after the ordeal, had been helped into the Gaines landau with Mrs. Ansell and Cicely; Mrs. Amherst had accepted a seat in the Dressel victoria; and Westy Gaines, with an _empressement_ slightly tinged by condescension, was in the act of placing his electric phaeton at Miss Brent's disposal.
She stood in the pretty white porch of the hospital, looking out across its squares of flower-edged turf at the long street of Westmore. In the warm gold-powdered light of September the factory town still seemed a blot on the face of nature; yet here and there, on all sides, Justine's eye saw signs of humanizing change. The rough banks along the street had been levelled and sodded; young maples, set in rows, already made a long festoon of gold against the dingy house-fronts; and the houses themselves--once so irreclaimably outlawed and degraded--showed, in their white-curtained windows, their flowery white-railed yards, a growing approach to civilized human dwellings.
Glancing the other way, one still met the grim pile of factories cutting the sky with their harsh roof-lines and blackened chimneys; but here also were signs of improvement. One of the mills had already been enlarged, another was scaffolded for the same purpose, and young trees and neatly-fenced turf replaced the surrounding desert of trampled earth.
As Amherst came out of the hospital, he heard Miss Brent declining a seat in Westy's phaeton.
Thank you so much; but there's some one here I want to see first--one of the operatives--and I can easily take a Hanaford car. She held out her hand with the smile that ran like colour over her whole face; and Westy, nettled by this unaccountable disregard of her privileges, mounted his chariot alone.
As he glided mournfully away, Amherst turned to Justine. "You wanted to see the Dillons?" he asked.
Their eyes met, and she smiled again. He had never seen her so sunned-over, so luminous, since the distant November day when they had picnicked with Cicely beside the swamp. He wondered vaguely if she were more elaborately dressed than usual, or if the festal impression she produced were simply a reflection of her mood.
I do want to see the Dillons--how did you guess? she rejoined; and Amherst felt a sudden impulse to reply: "For the same reason that made you think of them."
The fact of her remembering the Dillons made him absurdly happy; it re-established between them the mental communion that had been checked by his thoughts of the previous day.
I suppose I'm rather self-conscious about the Dillons, because they're one of my object lessons--they illustrate the text, he said laughing, as they went down the steps.
Westmore had been given a half-holiday for the opening of the hospital, and as Amherst and Justine turned into the street, parties of workers were dispersing toward their houses. They were still a dull-eyed stunted throng, to whom air and movement seemed to have been too long denied; but there was more animation in the groups, more light in individual faces; many of the younger men returned Amherst's good-day with a look of friendliness, and the women to whom he spoke met him with a volubility that showed the habit of frequent intercourse.
How much you have done! Justine exclaimed, as he rejoined her after one of these asides; but the next moment he saw a shade of embarrassment cross her face, as though she feared to have suggested comparisons she had meant to avoid.
He answered quite naturally: "Yes--I'm beginning to see my way now; and it's wonderful how they respond--" and they walked on without a shadow of constraint between them, while he described to her what was already done, and what direction his projected experiments were taking.
The Dillons had been placed in charge of one of the old factory tenements, now transformed into a lodging-house for unmarried operatives. Even its harsh brick exterior, hung with creepers and brightened by flower-borders, had taken on a friendly air; and indoors it had a clean sunny kitchen, a big dining-room with cheerful-coloured walls, and a room where the men could lounge and smoke about a table covered with papers.
The creation of these model lodging-houses had always been a favourite scheme of Amherst's, and the Dillons, incapacitated for factory work, had shown themselves admirably adapted to their new duties. In Mrs. Dillon's small hot sitting-room, among the starched sofa-tidies and pink shells that testified to the family prosperity, Justine shone with enjoyment and sympathy. She had always taken an interest in the lives and thoughts of working-people: not so much the constructive interest of the sociological mind as the vivid imaginative concern of a heart open to every human appeal. She liked to hear about their hard struggles and small pathetic successes: the children's sicknesses, the father's lucky job, the little sum they had been able to put by, the plans they had formed for Tommy's advancement, and how Sue's good marks at school were still ahead of Mrs. Hagan's Mary's.
What I really like is to gossip with them, and give them advice about the baby's cough, and the cheapest way to do their marketing, she said laughing, as she and Amherst emerged once more into the street. "It's the same kind of interest I used to feel in my dolls and guinea pigs--a managing, interfering old maid's interest. I don't believe I should care a straw for them if I couldn't dose them and order them about."
Amherst laughed too: he recalled the time when he had dreamed that just such warm personal sympathy was her sex's destined contribution to the broad work of human beneficence. Well, it had not been a dream: here was a woman whose deeds spoke for her. And suddenly the thought came to him: what might they not do at Westmore together! The brightness of it was blinding--like the dazzle of sunlight which faced them as they walked toward the mills. But it left him speechless, confused--glad to have a pretext for routing Duplain out of the office, introducing him to Miss Brent, and asking him for the keys of the buildings....
It was wonderful, again, how she grasped what he was doing in the mills, and saw how his whole scheme hung together, harmonizing the work and leisure of the operatives, instead of treating them as half machine, half man, and neglecting the man for the machine. Nor was she content with Utopian generalities: she wanted to know the how and why of each case, to hear what conclusions he drew from his results, to what solutions his experiments pointed.
In explaining the mill work he forgot his constraint and returned to the free comradery of mind that had always marked their relation. He turned the key reluctantly in the last door, and paused a moment on the threshold.
Anything more? he said, with a laugh meant to hide his desire to prolong their tour.
She glanced up at the sun, which still swung free of the tall factory roofs.
As much as you've time for. Cicely doesn't need me this afternoon, and I can't tell when I shall see Westmore again.
Her words fell on him with a chill. His smile faded, and he looked away for a moment.
But I hope Cicely will be here often, he said.
Oh, I hope so too, she rejoined, with seeming unconsciousness of any connection between the wish and her previous words.
Amherst hesitated. He had meant to propose a visit to the old Eldorado building, which now at last housed the long-desired night-schools and nursery; but since she had spoken he felt a sudden indifference to showing her anything more. What was the use, if she meant to leave Cicely, and drift out of his reach? He could get on well enough without sympathy and comprehension, but his momentary indulgence in them made the ordinary taste of life a little flat.
There must be more to see? she continued, as they turned back toward the village; and he answered absently: "Oh, yes--if you like."
He heard the change in his own voice, and knew by her quick side-glance that she had heard it too.
Please let me see everything that is compatible with my getting a car to Hanaford by six.
Well, then--the night-school next, he said with an effort at lightness; and to shake off the importunity of his own thoughts he added carelessly, as they walked on: "By the way--it seems improbable--but I think I saw Dr. Wyant yesterday in a Westmore car."
She echoed the name in surprise. "Dr. Wyant? Really! Are you sure?"
Not quite; but if it wasn't he it was his ghost. You haven't heard of his being at Hanaford?
No. I've heard nothing of him for ages.
Something in her tone made him return her side-glance; but her voice, on closer analysis, denoted only indifference, and her profile seemed to express the same negative sentiment. He remembered a vague Lynbrook rumour to the effect that the young doctor had been attracted to Miss Brent. Such floating seeds of gossip seldom rooted themselves in his mind, but now the fact acquired a new significance, and he wondered how he could have thought so little of it at the time. Probably her somewhat exaggerated air of indifference simply meant that she had been bored by Wyant's attentions, and that the reminder of them still roused a slight self-consciousness.
Amherst was relieved by this conclusion, and murmuring: "Oh, I suppose it can't have been he," led her rapidly on to the Eldorado. But the old sense of free communion was again obstructed, and her interest in the details of the schools and nursery now seemed to him only a part of her wonderful art of absorbing herself in other people's affairs. He was a fool to have been duped by it--to have fancied it was anything more personal than a grace of manner.
As she turned away from inspecting the blackboards in one of the empty school-rooms he paused before her and said suddenly: "You spoke of not seeing Westmore again. Are you thinking of leaving Cicely?"
The words were almost the opposite of those he had intended to speak; it was as if some irrepressible inner conviction flung defiance at his surface distrust of her.
She stood still also, and he saw a thought move across her face. "Not immediately--but perhaps when Mr. Langhope can make some other arrangement----"
Owing to the half-holiday they had the school-building to themselves, and the fact of being alone with her, without fear of interruption, woke in Amherst an uncontrollable longing to taste for once the joy of unguarded utterance.
Why do you go? he asked, moving close to the platform on which she stood.
She hesitated, resting her hand on the teacher's desk. Her eyes were kind, but he thought her tone was cold.
This easy life is rather out of my line, she said at length, with a smile that draped her words in vagueness.
Amherst looked at her again--she seemed to be growing remote and inaccessible. "You mean that you don't want to stay?"
His tone was so abrupt that it called forth one of her rare blushes. "No--not that. I have been very happy with Cicely--but soon I shall have to be doing something else."
Why was she blushing? And what did her last phrase mean? "Something else--?" The blood hummed in his ears--he began to hope she would not answer too quickly.
She had sunk into the seat behind the desk, propping her elbows on its lid, and letting her interlaced hands support her chin. A little bunch of violets which had been thrust into the folds of her dress detached itself and fell to the floor.
What I mean is, she said in a low voice, raising her eyes to Amherst's, "that I've had a great desire lately to get back to real work--my special work.... I've been too idle for the last year--I want to do some hard nursing; I want to help people who are miserable."
She spoke earnestly, almost passionately, and as he listened his undefined fear was lifted. He had never before seen her in this mood, with brooding brows, and the darkness of the world's pain in her eyes. All her glow had faded--she was a dun thrush-like creature, clothed in semi-tints; yet she seemed much nearer than when her smile shot light on him.
He stood motionless, his eyes absently fixed on the bunch of violets at her feet. Suddenly he raised his head, and broke out with a boyish blush: "Could it have been Wyant who was trying to see you?"
Dr. Wyant--trying to see me? She lowered her hands to the desk, and sat looking at him with open wonder.
He saw the irrelevance of his question, and burst, in spite of himself, into youthful laughter.
I mean--It's only that an unknown visitor called at the house yesterday, and insisted that you must have arrived. He seemed so annoyed at not finding you, that I thought...I imagined...it must be some one who knew you very well...and who had followed you here...for some special reason....
Her colour rose again, as if caught from his; but her eyes still declared her ignorance. "Some special reason----?"
And just now, he blurted out, "when you said you might not stay much longer with Cicely--I thought of the visit--and wondered if there was some one you meant to marry...."
A silence fell between them. Justine rose slowly, her eyes screened under the veil she had lowered. "No--I don't mean to marry," she said, half-smiling, as she came down from the platform.
Restored to his level, her small shadowy head just in a line with his eyes, she seemed closer, more approachable and feminine--yet Amherst did not dare to speak.
She took a few steps toward the window, looking out into the deserted street. "It's growing dark--I must go home," she said.
Yes, he assented absently as he followed her. He had no idea what she was saying. The inner voices in which they habitually spoke were growing louder than outward words. Or was it only the voice of his own desires that he heard--the cry of new hopes and unguessed capacities of living? All within him was flood-tide: this was the top of life, surely--to feel her alike in his brain and his pulses, to steep sight and hearing in the joy of her nearness, while all the while thought spoke clear: "This is the mate of my mind."
He began again abruptly. "Wouldn't you marry, if it gave you the chance to do what you say--if it offered you hard work, and the opportunity to make things better...for a great many people...as no one but yourself could do it?"
It was a strange way of putting his case: he was aware of it before he ended. But it had not occurred to him to tell her that she was lovely and desirable--in his humility he thought that what he had to give would plead for him better than what he was.
The effect produced on her by his question, though undecipherable, was extraordinary. She stiffened a little, remaining quite motionless, her eyes on the street.
_You!_ she just breathed; and he saw that she was beginning to tremble.
His wooing had been harsh and clumsy--he was afraid it had offended her, and his hand trembled too as it sought hers.
I only thought--it would be a dull business to most women--and I'm tied to it for life...but I thought...I've seen so often how you pity suffering...how you long to relieve it....
She turned away from him with a shuddering sigh. "Oh, I _hate_ suffering!" she broke out, raising her hands to her face.
Amherst was frightened. How senseless of him to go on reiterating the old plea! He ought to have pleaded for himself--to have let the man in him seek her and take his defeat, instead of beating about the flimsy bush of philanthropy.
I only meant--I was trying to make my work recommend me... he said with a half-laugh, as she remained silent, her eyes still turned away.
The silence continued for a long time--it stretched between them like a narrowing interminable road, down which, with a leaden heart, he seemed to watch her gradually disappearing. And then, unexpectedly, as she shrank to a tiny speck at the dip of the road, the perspective was mysteriously reversed, and he felt her growing nearer again, felt her close to him--felt her hand in his.
I'm really just like other women, you know--I shall like it because it's your work, she said.
EVERY one agreed that, on the whole, Mr. Langhope had behaved extremely well.
He was just beginning to regain his equanimity in the matter of the will--to perceive that, in the eyes of the public, something important and distinguished was being done at Westmore, and that the venture, while reducing Cicely's income during her minority, might, in some incredible way, actually make for its ultimate increase. So much Mr. Langhope, always eager to take the easiest view of the inevitable, had begun to let fall in his confidential comments on Amherst; when his newly-regained balance was rudely shaken by the news of his son-in-law's marriage.
The free expression of his anger was baffled by the fact that, even by the farthest stretch of self-extenuating logic, he could find no one to blame for the event but himself.
Why on earth don't you say so--don't you call me a triple-dyed fool for bringing them together? he challenged Mrs. Ansell, as they had the matter out together in the small intimate drawing-room of her New York apartment.
Mrs. Ansell, stirring her tea with a pensive hand, met the challenge composedly.
At present you're doing it for me, she reminded him; "and after all, I'm not so disposed to agree with you."
Not agree with me? But you told me not to engage Miss Brent! Didn't you tell me not to engage her?
She made a hesitating motion of assent.
But, good Lord, how was I to help myself? No man was ever in such a quandary! he broke off, leaping back to the other side of the argument.
No, she said, looking up at him suddenly. "I believe that, for the only time in your life, you were sorry then that you hadn't married me."
She held his eyes for a moment with a look of gentle malice; then he laughed, and drew forth his cigarette-case.
Oh, come--you've inverted the formula, he said, reaching out for the enamelled match-box at his elbow. She let the pleasantry pass with a slight smile, and he went on reverting to his grievance: "Why _didn't_ you want me to engage Miss Brent?"
Oh, I don't know...some instinct.
You won't tell me?
I couldn't if I tried; and now, after all----
After all--what?
She reflected. "You'll have Cicely off your mind, I mean."
Cicely off my mind? Mr. Langhope was beginning to find his charming friend less consolatory than usual. After all, the most magnanimous woman has her circuitous way of saying _I told you so_. "As if any good governess couldn't have done that for me!" he grumbled.
Ah--the present care for her. But I was looking ahead, she rejoined.
To what--if I may ask?
The next few years--when Mrs. Amherst may have children of her own.
Children of her own? He bounded up, furious at the suggestion.
Had it never occurred to you?
Hardly as a source of consolation!
I think a philosophic mind might find it so.
I should really be interested to know how!
Mrs. Ansell put down her cup, and again turned her gentle tolerant eyes upon him.
Mr. Amherst, as a father, will take a more conservative view of his duties. Every one agrees that, in spite of his theories, he has a good head for business; and whatever he does at Westmore for the advantage of his children will naturally be for Cicely's advantage too.
Mr. Langhope returned her gaze thoughtfully. "There's something in what you say," he admitted after a pause. "But it doesn't alter the fact that, with Amherst unmarried, the whole of the Westmore fortune would have gone back to Cicely--where it belongs."
Possibly. But it was so unlikely that he would remain unmarried.
I don't see why! A man of honour would have felt bound to keep the money for Cicely.
But you must remember that, from Mr. Amherst's standpoint, the money belongs rather to Westmore than to Cicely.
He's no better than a socialist, then!
Well--supposing he isn't: the birth of a son and heir will cure that.
Mr. Langhope winced, but she persisted gently: "It's really safer for Cicely as it is--" and before the end of the conference he found himself confessing, half against his will: "Well, since he hadn't the decency to remain single, I'm thankful he hasn't inflicted a stranger on us; and I shall never forget what Miss Brent did for my poor Bessy...."
It was the view she had wished to bring him to, and the view which, in due course, with all his accustomed grace and adaptability, he presented to the searching gaze of a society profoundly moved by the incident of Amherst's marriage. "Of course, if Mr. Langhope approves--" society reluctantly murmured; and that Mr. Langhope did approve was presently made manifest by every outward show of consideration toward the newly-wedded couple.
* * * * *
Amherst and Justine had been married in September; and after a holiday in Canada and the Adirondacks they returned to Hanaford for the winter. Amherst had proposed a short flight to Europe; but his wife preferred to settle down at once to her new duties.
The announcement of her marriage had been met by Mrs. Dressel with a comment which often afterward returned to her memory. "It's splendid for you, of course, dear, _in one way_," her friend had murmured, between disparagement and envy--"that is, if you can stand talking about the Westmore mill-hands all the rest of your life."
Oh, but I couldn't--I should hate it! Justine had energetically rejoined; meeting Mrs. Dressel's admonitory "Well, then?" with the laughing assurance that _she_ meant to lead the conversation.
She knew well enough what the admonition meant. To Amherst, so long thwarted in his chosen work, the subject of Westmore was becoming an _idée fixe_; and it was natural that Hanaford should class him as a man of one topic. But Justine had guessed at his other side; a side as long thwarted, and far less articulate, which she intended to wake into life. She had felt it in him from the first, though their talks had so uniformly turned on the subject which palled on Hanaford; and it had been revealed to her during the silent hours among his books, when she had grown into such close intimacy with his mind.
She did not, assuredly, mean to spend the rest of her days talking about the Westmore mill-hands; but in the arrogance of her joy she wished to begin her married life in the setting of its habitual duties, and to achieve the victory of evoking the secret unsuspected Amherst out of the preoccupied business man chained to his task. Dull lovers might have to call on romantic scenes to wake romantic feelings; but Justine's glancing imagination leapt to the challenge of extracting poetry from the prose of routine.
And this was precisely the triumph that the first months brought her. To mortal eye, Amherst and Justine seemed to be living at Hanaford: in reality they were voyaging on unmapped seas of adventure. The seas were limitless, and studded with happy islands: every fresh discovery they made about each other, every new agreement of ideas and feelings, offered itself to these intrepid explorers as a friendly coast where they might beach their keel and take their bearings. Thus, in the thronging hum of metaphor, Justine sometimes pictured their relation; seeing it, again, as a journey through crowded populous cities, where every face she met was Amherst's; or, contrarily, as a multiplication of points of perception, so that one became, for the world's contact, a surface so multitudinously alive that the old myth of hearing the grass grow and walking the rainbow explained itself as the heightening of personality to the utmost pitch of sympathy.
In reality, the work at Westmore became an almost necessary sedative after these flights into the blue. She felt sometimes that they would have been bankrupted of sensations if daily hours of drudgery had not provided a reservoir in which fresh powers of enjoyment could slowly gather. And their duties had the rarer quality of constituting, precisely, the deepest, finest bond between them, the clarifying element which saved their happiness from stagnation, and kept it in the strong mid-current of human feeling.
It was this element in their affection which, in the last days of November, was unexpectedly put on trial. Mr. Langhope, since his return from his annual visit to Europe, showed signs of diminishing strength and elasticity. He had had to give up his nightly dinner parties, to desert his stall at the Opera: to take, in short, as he plaintively put it, his social pleasures hom?opathically. Certain of his friends explained the change by saying that he had never been "quite the same" since his daughter's death; while others found its determining cause in the shock of Amherst's second marriage. But this insinuation Mr. Langhope in due time discredited by writing to ask the Amhersts if they would not pity his loneliness and spend the winter in town with him. The proposal came in a letter to Justine, which she handed to her husband one afternoon on his return from the mills.
She sat behind the tea-table in the Westmore drawing-room, now at last transformed, not into Mrs. Dressel's vision of "something lovely in Louis Seize," but into a warm yet sober setting for books, for scattered flowers, for deep chairs and shaded lamps in pleasant nearness to each other.
Amherst raised his eyes from the letter, thinking as he did so how well her bright head, with its flame-like play of meanings, fitted into the background she had made for it. Still unobservant of external details, he was beginning to feel a vague well-being of the eye wherever her touch had passed.
Well, we must do it, he said simply.
Oh, must we? she murmured, holding out his cup.
He smiled at her note of dejection. "Unnatural woman! New York _versus_ Hanaford--do you really dislike it so much?"
She tried to bring a tone of consent into her voice. "I shall be very glad to be with Cicely again--and that, of course," she reflected, "is the reason why Mr. Langhope wants us."
Well--if it is, it's a good reason.
Yes. But how much shall you be with us?
If you say so, I'll arrange to get away for a month or two.
Oh, no: I don't want that! she said, with a smile that triumphed a little. "But why should not Cicely come here?"
If Mr. Langhope is cut off from his usual amusements, I'm afraid that would only make him more lonely.
Yes, I suppose so. She put aside her untasted cup, resting her elbows on her knees, and her chin on her clasped hands, in the attitude habitual to her in moments of inward debate.
Amherst rose and seated himself on the sofa beside her. "Dear! What is it?" he said, drawing her hands down, so that she had to turn her face to his.
Nothing...I don't know...a superstition. I've been so happy here!
Is our happiness too perishable to be transplanted?
She smiled and answered by another question. "You don't mind doing it, then?"
Amherst hesitated. "Shall I tell you? I feel that it's a sort of ring of Polycrates. It may buy off the jealous gods."
A faint shrinking from some importunate suggestion seemed to press her closer to him. "Then you feel they _are_ jealous?" she breathed, in a half-laugh.
I pity them if they're not!
Yes, she agreed, rallying to his tone. "I only had a fancy that they might overlook such a dull place as Hanaford."
Amherst drew her to him. "Isn't it, on the contrary, in the ash-heaps that the rag-pickers prowl?"
* * * * *
There was no disguising it: she was growing afraid of her happiness. Her husband's analogy of the ring expressed her fear. She seemed to herself to carry a blazing jewel on her breast--something that singled her out for human envy and divine pursuit. She had a preposterous longing to dress plainly and shabbily, to subdue her voice and gestures, to try to slip through life unnoticed; yet all the while she knew that her jewel would shoot its rays through every disguise. And from the depths of ancient atavistic instincts came the hope that Amherst was right--that by sacrificing their precious solitude to Mr. Langhope's convenience they might still deceive the gods.
* * * * *
Once pledged to her new task, Justine, as usual, espoused it with ardour. It was pleasant, even among greater joys, to see her husband again frankly welcomed by Mr. Langhope; to see Cicely bloom into happiness at their coming; and to overhear Mr. Langhope exclaim, in a confidential aside to his son-in-law: "It's wonderful, the _bien-être_ that wife of yours diffuses about her!"
The element of _bien-être_ was the only one in which Mr. Langhope could draw breath; and to those who kept him immersed in it he was prodigal of delicate attentions. The experiment, in short, was a complete success; and even Amherst's necessary weeks at Hanaford had the merit of giving a finer flavour to his brief appearances.
Of all this Justine was thinking as she drove down Fifth Avenue one January afternoon to meet her husband at the Grand Central station. She had tamed her happiness at last: the quality of fear had left it, and it nestled in her heart like some wild creature subdued to human ways. And, as her inward bliss became more and more a quiet habit of the mind, the longing to help and minister returned, absorbing her more deeply in her husband's work.
She dismissed the carriage at the station, and when his train had arrived they emerged together into the cold winter twilight and turned up Madison Avenue. These walks home from the station gave them a little more time to themselves than if they had driven; and there was always so much to tell on both sides. This time the news was all good: the work at Westmore was prospering, and on Justine's side there was a more cheerful report of Mr. Langhope's health, and--best of all--his promise to give them Cicely for the summer. Amherst and Justine were both anxious that the child should spend more time at Hanaford, that her young associations should begin to gather about Westmore; and Justine exulted in the fact that the suggestion had come from Mr. Langhope himself, while she and Amherst were still planning how to lead him up to it.
They reached the house while this triumph was still engaging them; and in the doorway Amherst turned to her with a smile.
And of course--dear man!--he believes the idea is all his. There's nothing you can't make people believe, you little Jesuit!
I don't think there is! she boasted, falling gaily into his tone; and then, as the door opened, and she entered the hall, her eyes fell on a blotted envelope which lay among the letters on the table.
The parlour-maid proffered it with a word of explanation. "A gentleman left it for you, madam; he asked to see you, and said he'd call for the answer in a day or two."
Another begging letter, I suppose, said Amherst, turning into the drawing-room, where Mr. Langhope and Cicely awaited them; and Justine, carelessly pushing the envelope into her muff, murmured "I suppose so" as she followed him.