OVER the tea-table Justine forgot the note in her muff; but when she went upstairs to dress it fell to the floor, and she picked it up and laid it on her dressing-table.
She had already recognized the hand as Wyant's, for it was not the first letter she had received from him.
Three times since her marriage he had appealed to her for help, excusing himself on the plea of difficulties and ill-health. The first time he wrote, he alluded vaguely to having married, and to being compelled, through illness, to give up his practice at Clifton. On receiving this letter she made enquiries, and learned that, a month or two after her departure from Lynbrook, Wyant had married a Clifton girl--a pretty piece of flaunting innocence, whom she remembered about the lanes, generally with a young man in a buggy. There had evidently been something obscure and precipitate about the marriage, which was a strange one for the ambitious young doctor. Justine conjectured that it might have been the cause of his leaving Clifton--or or perhaps he had already succumbed to the fatal habit she had suspected in him. At any rate he seemed, in some mysterious way, to have dropped in two years from promise to failure; yet she could not believe that, with his talents, and the name he had begun to make, such a lapse could be more than temporary. She had often heard Dr. Garford prophesy great things for him; but Dr. Garford had died suddenly during the previous summer, and the loss of this powerful friend was mentioned by Wyant among his misfortunes.
Justine was anxious to help him, but her marriage to a rich man had not given her the command of much money. She and Amherst, choosing to regard themselves as pensioners on the Westmore fortune, were scrupulous in restricting their personal expenditure; and her work among the mill-hands brought many demands on the modest allowance which her husband had insisted on her accepting. In reply to Wyant's first appeal, which reached her soon after her marriage, she had sent him a hundred dollars; but when the second came, some two months later--with a fresh tale of ill-luck and ill-health--she had not been able to muster more than half the amount. Finally a third letter had arrived, a short time before their leaving for New York. It told the same story of persistent misfortune, but on this occasion Wyant, instead of making a direct appeal for money, suggested that, through her hospital connections, she should help him to establish a New York practice. His tone was half-whining, half-peremptory, his once precise writing smeared and illegible; and these indications, combined with her former suspicions, convinced her that, for the moment, he was unfit for medical work. At any rate, she could not assume the responsibility of recommending him; and in answering she advised him to apply to some of the physicians he had worked with at Lynbrook, softening her refusal by the enclosure of a small sum of money. To this letter she received no answer. Wyant doubtless found the money insufficient, and resented her unwillingness to help him by the use of her influence; and she felt sure that the note before her contained a renewal of his former request.
An obscure reluctance made her begin to undress before opening it. She felt slightly tired and indolently happy, and she did not wish any jarring impression to break in on the sense of completeness which her husband's coming always put into her life. Her happiness was making her timid and luxurious: she was beginning to shrink from even trivial annoyances.
But when at length, in her dressing-gown, her loosened hair about her shoulders, she seated herself before the toilet-mirror, Wyant's note once more confronted her. It was absurd to put off reading it--if he asked for money again, she would simply confide the whole business to Amherst.
She had never spoken to her husband of her correspondence with Wyant. The mere fact that the latter had appealed to her, instead of addressing himself to Amherst, made her suspect that he had a weakness to hide, and counted on her professional discretion. But his continued importunities would certainly release her from any such supposed obligation; and she thought with relief of casting the weight of her difficulty on her husband's shoulders.
She opened the note and read.
"I did not acknowledge your last letter because I was ashamed to tell you that the money was not enough to be of any use. But I am past shame now. My wife was confined three weeks ago, and has been desperately ill ever since. She is in no state to move, but we shall be put out of these rooms unless I can get money or work at once. A word from you would have given me a start in New York--and I'd be willing to begin again as an interne or a doctor's assistant. I have never reminded you of what you owe me, and I should not do so now if I hadn't been to hell and back since I saw you. But I suppose you would rather have me remind you than apply to Mr. Amherst. You can tell me when to call for my answer.""
"Justine laid down the letter and looked up. Her eyes rested on her own reflection in the glass, and it frightened her. She sat motionless, with a thickly-beating heart, one hand clenched on the letter.
_"I suppose you would rather have me remind you than apply to Mr. Amherst."_
That was what his importunity meant, then! She had been paying blackmail all this time.... Somewhere, from the first, in an obscure fold of consciousness, she had felt the stir of an unnamed, unacknowledged fear; and now the fear raised its head and looked at her. Well! She would look back at it, then: look it straight in the malignant eye. What was it, after all, but a "bugbear to scare children"--the ghost of the opinion of the many? She had suspected from the first that Wyant knew of her having shortened the term of Bessy Amherst's sufferings--returning to the room when he did, it was almost impossible that he should not have guessed what had happened; and his silence had made her believe that he understood her motive and approved it. But, supposing she had been mistaken, she still had nothing to fear, since she had done nothing that her own conscience condemned. If the act were to do again she would do it--she had never known a moment's regret!
Suddenly she heard Amherst's step in the passage--heard him laughing and talking as he chased Cicely up the stairs to the nursery.
_If she was not afraid, why had she never told Amherst?_
Why, the answer to that was simple enough! She had not told him _because she was not afraid_. From the first she had retained sufficient detachment to view her act impartially, to find it completely justified by circumstances, and to decide that, since those circumstances could be but partly and indirectly known to her husband, she not only had the right to keep her own counsel, but was actually under a kind of obligation not to force on him the knowledge of a fact that he could not alter and could not completely judge.... Was there any flaw in this line of reasoning? Did it not show a deliberate weighing of conditions, a perfect rectitude of intention? And, after all, she had had Amherst's virtual consent to her act! She knew his feelings on such matters--his independence of traditional judgments, his horror of inflicting needless pain--she was as sure of his intellectual assent as of her own. She was even sure that, when she told him, he would appreciate her reasons for not telling him before....
For now of course he must know everything--this horrible letter made it inevitable. She regretted that she had decided, though for the best of reasons, not to speak to him of her own accord; for it was intolerable that he should think of any external pressure as having brought her to avowal. But no! he would not think that. The understanding between them was so complete that no deceptive array of circumstances could ever make her motives obscure to him. She let herself rest a moment in the thought....
Presently she heard him moving in the next room--he had come back to dress for dinner. She would go to him now, at once--she could not bear this weight on her mind the whole evening. She pushed back her chair, crumpling the letter in her hand; but as she did so, her eyes again fell on her reflection. She could not go to her husband with such a face! If she was not afraid, why did she look like that?
Well--she was afraid! It would be easier and simpler to admit it. She was afraid--afraid for the first time--afraid for her own happiness! She had had just eight months of happiness--it was horrible to think of losing it so soon.... Losing it? But why should she lose it? The letter must have affected her brain...all her thoughts were in a blur of fear.... Fear of what? Of the man who understood her as no one else understood her? The man to whose wisdom and mercy she trusted as the believer trusts in God? This was a kind of abominable nightmare--even Amherst's image had been distorted in her mind! The only way to clear her brain, to recover the normal sense of things, was to go to him now, at once, to feel his arms about her, to let his kiss dispel her fears.... She rose with a long breath of relief.
She had to cross the length of the room to reach his door, and when she had gone half-way she heard him knock.
May I come in?
She was close to the fire-place, and a bright fire burned on the hearth.
Come in! she answered; and as she did so, she turned and dropped Wyant's letter into the fire. Her hand had crushed it into a little ball, and she saw the flames spring up and swallow it before her husband entered.
It was not that she had changed her mind--she still meant to tell him everything. But to hold the letter was like holding a venomous snake--she wanted to exterminate it, to forget that she had ever seen the blotted repulsive characters. And she could not bear to have Amherst's eyes rest on it, to have him know that any man had dared to write to her in that tone. What vile meanings might not be read between Wyant's phrases? She had a right to tell the story in her own way--the true way....
As Amherst approached, in his evening clothes, the heavy locks smoothed from his forehead, a flower of Cicely's giving in his button-hole, she thought she had never seen him look so kind and handsome.
Not dressed? Do you know that it's ten minutes to eight? he said, coming up to her with a smile.
She roused herself, putting her hands to her hair. "Yes, I know--I forgot," she murmured, longing to feel his arms about her, but standing rooted to the ground, unable to move an inch nearer.
It was he who came close, drawing her lifted hands into his. "You look worried--I hope it was nothing troublesome that made you forget?"
The divine kindness in his voice, his eyes! Yes--it would be easy, quite easy, to tell him....
No--yes--I was a little troubled.... she said, feeling the warmth of his touch flow through her hands reassuringly.
Dear! What about?
She drew a deep breath. "The letter----"
He looked puzzled. "What letter?"
Downstairs...when we came in...it was not an ordinary begging-letter.
No? What then? he asked, his face clouding.
She noticed the change, and it frightened her. Was he angry? Was he going to be angry? But how absurd! He was only distressed at her distress.
What then? he repeated, more gently.
She looked up into his eyes for an instant. "It was a horrible letter----" she whispered, as she pressed her clasped hands against him.
His grasp tightened on her wrists, and again the stern look crossed his face. "Horrible? What do you mean?"
She had never seen him angry--but she felt suddenly that, to the guilty creature, his anger would be terrible. He would crush Wyant--she must be careful how she spoke.
I didn't mean that--only painful....
Where is the letter? Let me see it.
Oh, no she exclaimed, shrinking away.
Justine, what has happened? What ails you?
On a blind impulse she had backed toward the hearth, propping her arms against the mantel-piece while she stole a secret glance at the embers. Nothing remained of it--no, nothing.
But suppose it was against herself that his anger turned? The idea was preposterous, yet she trembled at it. It was clear that she must say _something_ at once--must somehow account for her agitation. But the sense that she was unnerved--no longer in control of her face, her voice--made her feel that she would tell her story badly if she told it now.... Had she not the right to gain a respite, to choose her own hour? Weakness--weakness again! Every delay would only increase the phantom terror. Now, _now_--with her head on his breast!
She turned toward him and began to speak impulsively.
I can't show you the letter, because it's not--not my secret----
Ah? he murmured, perceptibly relieved.
It's from some one--unlucky--whom I've known about....
And whose troubles have been troubling you? But can't we help?
She shone on him through gleaming lashes. "Some one poor and ill--who needs money, I mean----" She tried to laugh away her tears. "And I haven't any! That's _my_ trouble!"
Foolish child! And to beg you are ashamed? And so you're letting your tears cool Mr. Langhope's soup? He had her in his arms now, his kisses drying her cheek; and she turned her head so that their lips met in a long pressure.
Will a hundred dollars do? he asked with a smile as he released her.
_A hundred dollars!_ No--she was almost sure they would not. But she tried to shape a murmur of gratitude. "Thank you--thank you! I hated to ask...."
I'll write the cheque at once.
No--no, she protested, "there's no hurry."
But he went back to his room, and she turned again to the toilet-table. Her face was painful to look at still--but a light was breaking through its fear. She felt the touch of a narcotic in her veins. How calm and peaceful the room was--and how delicious to think that her life would go on in it, safely and peacefully, in the old familiar way!
As she swept up her hair, passing the comb through it, and flinging it dexterously over her lifted wrist, she heard Amherst cross the floor behind her, and pause to lay something on her writing-table.
Thank you, she murmured again, lowering her head as he passed.
When the door had closed on him she thrust the last pin into her hair, dashed some drops of Cologne on her face, and went over to the writing-table. As she picked up the cheque she saw it was for three hundred dollars.
ONCE or twice, in the days that followed, Justine found herself thinking that she had never known happiness before. The old state of secure well-being seemed now like a dreamless sleep; but this new bliss, on its sharp pinnacle ringed with fire--this thrilling conscious joy, daily and hourly snatched from fear--this was living, not sleeping!
Wyant acknowledged her gift with profuse, almost servile thanks. She had sent it without a word--saying to herself that pity for his situation made it possible to ignore his baseness. And the days went on as before. She was not conscious of any change, save in the heightened, almost artificial quality of her happiness, till one day in March, when Mr. Langhope announced that he was going for two or three weeks to a friend's shooting-box in the south. The anniversary of Bessy's death was approaching, and Justine knew that at that time he always absented himself.
Supposing you and Amherst were to carry off Cicely till I come back? Perhaps you could persuade him to break away from work for once--or, if that's impossible, you could take her with you to Hanaford. She looks a little pale, and the change would be good for her.
This was a great concession on Mr. Langhope's part, and Justine saw the pleasure in her husband's face. It was the first time that his father-in-law had suggested Cicely's going to Hanaford.
I'm afraid I can't break away just now, sir, Amherst said, "but it will be delightful for Justine if you'll give us Cicely while you're away."
Take her by all means, my dear fellow: I always sleep on both ears when she's with your wife.
It was nearly three months since Justine had left Hanaford--and now she was to return there alone with her husband! There would be hours, of course, when the child's presence was between them--or when, again, his work would keep him at the mills. But in the evenings, when Cicely was in bed--when he and she sat alone, together in the Westmore drawing-room--in Bessy's drawing-room!... No--she must find some excuse for remaining away till she had again grown used to the idea of being alone with Amherst. Every day she was growing a little more used to it; but it would take time--time, and the full assurance that Wyant was silenced. Till then she could not go back to Hanaford.
She found a pretext in her own health. She pleaded that she was a little tired, below par...and to return to Hanaford meant returning to hard work; with the best will in the world she could not be idle there. Might she not, she suggested, take Cicely to Tuxedo or Lakewood, and thus get quite away from household cares and good works? The pretext rang hollow--it was so unlike her! She saw Amherst's eyes rest anxiously on her as Mr. Langhope uttered his prompt assent. Certainly she did look tired--Mr. Langhope himself had noticed it. Had he perhaps over-taxed her energies, left the household too entirely on her shoulders? Oh, no--it was only the New York air...like Cicely, she pined for a breath of the woods.... And so, the day Mr. Langhope left, she and Cicely were packed off to Lakewood.
They stayed there a week: then a fit of restlessness drove Justine back to town. She found an excuse in the constant rain--it was really useless, as she wrote Mr. Langhope, to keep the child imprisoned in an over-heated hotel while they could get no benefit from the outdoor life. In reality, she found the long lonely hours unendurable. She pined for a sight of her husband, and thought of committing Cicely to Mrs. Ansell's care, and making a sudden dash for Hanaford. But the vision of the long evenings in the Westmore drawing-room again restrained her. No--she would simply go back to New York, dine out occasionally, go to a concert or two, trust to the usual demands of town life to crowd her hours with small activities.... And in another week Mr. Langhope would be back and the days would resume their normal course.
On arriving, she looked feverishly through the letters in the hall. None from Wyant--that fear was allayed! Every day added to her reassurance. By this time, no doubt, he was on his feet again, and ashamed--unutterably ashamed--of the threat that despair had wrung from him. She felt almost sure that his shame would keep him from ever attempting to see her, or even from writing again.
A gentleman called to see you yesterday, madam--he would give no name, the parlour-maid said. And there was the sick fear back on her again! She could hardly control the trembling of her lips as she asked: "Did he leave no message?"
No, madam: he only wanted to know when you'd be back.
She longed to return: "And did you tell him?" but restrained herself, and passed into the drawing-room. After all, the parlour-maid had not described the caller--why jump to the conclusion that it was Wyant?
Three days passed, and no letter came--no sign. She struggled with the temptation to describe Wyant to the servants, and to forbid his admission. But it would not do. They were nearly all old servants, in whose eyes she was still the intruder, the upstart sick-nurse--she could not wholly trust them. And each day she felt a little easier, a little more convinced that the unknown visitor had not been Wyant.
On the fourth day she received a letter from Amherst. He hoped to be back on the morrow, but as his plans were still uncertain he would telegraph in the morning--and meanwhile she must keep well, and rest, and amuse herself....
Amuse herself! That evening, as it happened, she was going to the theatre with Mrs. Ansell. She and Mrs. Ansell, though outwardly on perfect terms, had not greatly advanced in intimacy. The agitated, decentralized life of the older woman seemed futile and trivial to Justine; but on Mr. Langhope's account she wished to keep up an appearance of friendship with his friend, and the same motive doubtless inspired Mrs. Ansell. Just now, at any rate, Justine was grateful for her attentions, and glad to go about with her. Anything--anything to get away from her own thoughts! That was the pass she had come to.
At the theatre, in a proscenium box, the publicity, the light and movement, the action of the play, all helped to distract and quiet her. At such moments she grew ashamed of her fears. Why was she tormenting herself? If anything happened she had only to ask her husband for more money. She never spoke to him of her good works, and there would be nothing to excite suspicion in her asking help again for the friend whose secret she was pledged to keep.... But nothing was going to happen. As the play progressed, and the stimulus of talk and laughter flowed through her veins, she felt a complete return of confidence. And then suddenly she glanced across the house, and saw Wyant looking at her.
He sat rather far back, in one of the side rows just beneath the balcony, so that his face was partly shaded. But even in the shadow it frightened her. She had been prepared for a change, but not for this ghastly deterioration. And he continued to look at her.
She began to be afraid that he would do something conspicuous--point at her, or stand up in his seat. She thought he looked half-mad--or was it her own hallucination that made him appear so? She and Mrs. Ansell were alone in the box for the moment, and she started up, pushing back her chair....
Mrs. Ansell leaned forward. "What is it?"
Nothing--the heat--I'll sit back for a moment. But as she withdrew into the back of the box, she was seized by a new fear. If he was still watching, might he not come to the door and try to speak to her? Her only safety lay in remaining in full view of the audience; and she returned to Mrs. Ansell's side.
The other members of the party came back--the bell rang, the foot-lights blazed, the curtain rose. She lost herself in the mazes of the play. She sat so motionless, her face so intently turned toward the stage, that the muscles at the back of her neck began to stiffen. And then, quite suddenly, toward the middle of the act, she felt an undefinable sense of relief. She could not tell what caused it--but slowly, cautiously, while the eyes of the others were intent upon the stage, she turned her head and looked toward Wyant's seat. It was empty.
Her first thought was that he had gone to wait for her outside. But no--there were two more acts: why should he stand at the door for half the evening?
At last the act ended; the entr'acte elapsed; the play went on again--and still the seat was empty. Gradually she persuaded herself that she had been mistaken in thinking that the man who had occupied it was Wyant. Her self-command returned, she began to think and talk naturally, to follow the dialogue on the stage--and when the evening was over, and Mrs. Ansell set her down at her door, she had almost forgotten her fears.
The next morning she felt calmer than for many days. She was sure now that if Wyant had wished to speak to her he would have waited at the door of the theatre; and the recollection of his miserable face made apprehension yield to pity. She began to feel that she had treated him coldly, uncharitably. They had been friends once, as well as fellow-workers; but she had been false even to the comradeship of the hospital. She should have sought him out and given him sympathy as well as money; had she shown some sign of human kindness his last letter might never have been written.
In the course of the morning Amherst telegraphed that he hoped to settle his business in time to catch the two o'clock express, but that his plans were still uncertain. Justine and Cicely lunched alone, and after luncheon the little girl was despatched to her dancing-class. Justine herself meant to go out when the brougham returned. She went up to her room to dress, planning to drive in the park, and to drop in on Mrs. Ansell before she called for Cicely; but on the way downstairs she saw the servant opening the door to a visitor. It was too late to draw back; and descending the last steps she found herself face to face with Wyant.
They looked at each other a moment in silence; then Justine murmured a word of greeting and led the way to the drawing-room.
It was a snowy afternoon, and in the raw ash-coloured light she thought he looked more changed than at the theatre. She remarked, too, that his clothes were worn and untidy, his gloveless hands soiled and tremulous. None of the degrading signs of his infirmity were lacking; and she saw at once that, while in the early days of the habit he had probably mixed his drugs, so that the conflicting symptoms neutralized each other, he had now sunk into open morphia-taking. She felt profoundly sorry for him; yet as he followed her into the room physical repulsion again mastered the sense of pity.
But where action was possible she was always self-controlled, and she turned to him quietly as they seated themselves.
I have been wishing to see you, she said, looking at him. "I have felt that I ought to have done so sooner--to have told you how sorry I am for your bad luck."
He returned her glance with surprise: they were evidently the last words he had expected.
You're very kind, he said in a low embarrassed voice. He had kept on his shabby over-coat, and he twirled his hat in his hands as he spoke.
I have felt, Justine continued, "that perhaps a talk with you might be of more use----"
He raised his head, fixing her with bright narrowed eyes. "I have felt so too: that's my reason for coming. You sent me a generous present some weeks ago--but I don't want to go on living on charity."
I understand that, she answered. "But why have you had to do so? Won't you tell me just what has happened?"
She felt the words to be almost a mockery; yet she could not say "I read your history at a glance"; and she hoped that her question might draw out his wretched secret, and thus give her the chance to speak frankly.
He gave a nervous laugh. "Just what has happened? It's a long story--and some of the details are not particularly pretty." He broke off, moving his hat more rapidly through his trembling hands.
Never mind: tell me.
Well--after you all left Lynbrook I had rather a bad break-down--the strain of Mrs. Amherst's case, I suppose. You remember Bramble, the Clifton grocer? Miss Bramble nursed me--I daresay you remember her too. When I recovered I married her--and after that things didn't go well.
He paused, breathing quickly, and looking about the room with odd, furtive glances. "I was only half-well, anyhow--I couldn't attend to my patients properly--and after a few months we decided to leave Clifton, and I bought a practice in New Jersey. But my wife was ill there, and things went wrong again--damnably. I suppose you've guessed that my marriage was a mistake. She had an idea that we should do better in New York--so we came here a few months ago, and we've done decidedly worse."
Justine listened with a sense of discouragement. She saw now that he did not mean to acknowledge his failing, and knowing the secretiveness of the drug-taker she decided that he was deluded enough to think he could still deceive her.
Well, he began again, with an attempt at jauntiness, "I've found out that in my profession it's a hard struggle to get on your feet again, after illness or--or any bad set-back. That's the reason I asked you to say a word for me. It's not only the money, though I need that badly--I want to get back my self-respect. With my record I oughtn't to be where I am--and you can speak for me better than any one."
Why better than the doctors you've worked with? Justine put the question abruptly, looking him straight in the eyes.
His glance dropped, and an unpleasant flush rose to his thin cheeks.
Well--as it happens, you're better situated than any one to help me to the particular thing I want.
The particular thing----?
Yes. I understand that Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell are both interested in the new wing for paying patients at Saint Christopher's. I want the position of house-physician there, and I know you can get it for me.
His tone changed as he spoke, till with the last words it became rough and almost menacing.
Justine felt her colour rise, and her heart began to beat confusedly. Here was the truth, then: she could no longer be the dupe of her own compassion. The man knew his power and meant to use it. But at the thought her courage was in arms.
I'm sorry--but it's impossible, she said.
Impossible--why?
She continued to look at him steadily. "You said just now that you wished to regain your self-respect. Well, you must regain it before you can ask me--or any one else--to recommend you to a position of trust."
Wyant half-rose, with an angry murmur. "My self-respect? What do you mean? _I_ meant that I'd lost courage--through ill-luck----"
Yes; and your ill-luck has come through your own fault. Till you cure yourself you're not fit to cure others.
He sank back into his seat, glowering at her under sullen brows; then his expression gradually changed to half-sneering admiration. "You're a plucky one!" he said.
Justine repressed a movement of disgust. "I am very sorry for you," she said gravely. "I saw this trouble coming on you long ago--and if there is any other way in which I can help you----"
Thanks, he returned, still sneering. "Your sympathy is very precious--there was a time when I would have given my soul for it. But that's over, and I'm here to talk business. You say you saw my trouble coming on--did it ever occur to you that you were the cause of it?"
Justine glanced at him with frank contempt. "No--for I was not," she replied.
That's an easy way out of it. But you took everything from me--first my hope of marrying you; then my chance of a big success in my career; and I was desperate--weak, if you like--and tried to deaden my feelings in order to keep up my pluck.
Justine rose to her feet with a movement of impatience. "Every word you say proves how unfit you are to assume any responsibility--to do anything but try to recover your health. If I can help you to that, I am still willing to do so."
Wyant rose also, moving a step nearer. "Well, get me that place, then--I'll see to the rest: I'll keep straight."
No--it's impossible.
You won't?
I can't, she repeated firmly.
And you expect to put me off with that answer?
She hesitated. "Yes--if there's no other help you'll accept."
He laughed again--his feeble sneering laugh was disgusting. "Oh, I don't say that. I'd like to earn my living honestly--funny preference--but if you cut me off from that, I suppose it's only fair to let you make up for it. My wife and child have got to live."
You choose a strange way of helping them; but I will do what I can if you will go for a while to some institution----
He broke in furiously. "Institution be damned! You can't shuffle me out of the way like that. I'm all right--good food is what I need. You think I've got morphia in me--why, it's hunger!"
Justine heard him with a renewal of pity. "Oh, I'm sorry for you--very sorry! Why do you try to deceive me?"
Why do you deceive _me_? You know what I want and you know you've got to let me have it. If you won't give me a line to one of your friends at Saint Christopher's you'll have to give me another cheque--that's the size of it.
As they faced each other in silence Justine's pity gave way to a sudden hatred for the poor creature who stood shivering and sneering before her.
You choose the wrong tone--and I think our talk has lasted long enough, she said, stretching her hand to the bell.
Wyant did not move. "Don't ring--unless you want me to write to your husband," he rejoined.
A sick feeling of helplessness overcame her; but she turned on him firmly. "I pardoned you once for that threat!"
Yes--and you sent me some money the next day.
I was mistaken enough to think that, in your distress, you had not realized what you wrote. But if you're a systematic blackmailer----
Gently--gently. Bad names don't frighten me--it's hunger and debt I'm afraid of.
Justine felt a last tremor of compassion. He was abominable--but he was pitiable too.
I will really help you--I will see your wife and do what I can--but I can give you no money today.
Why not?
Because I have none. I am not as rich as you think.
He smiled incredulously. "Give me a line to Mr. Langhope, then."
No.
He sat down once more, leaning back with a weak assumption of ease. "Perhaps Mr. Amherst will think differently."
She whitened, but said steadily: "Mr. Amherst is away."
Very well--I can write.
For the last five minutes Justine had foreseen this threat, and had tried to force her mind to face dispassionately the chances it involved. After all, why not let him write to Amherst? The very vileness of the deed must rouse an indignation which would be all in her favour, would inevitably dispose her husband to readier sympathy with the motive of her act, as contrasted with the base insinuations of her slanderer. It seemed impossible that Amherst should condemn her when his condemnation involved the fulfilling of Wyant's calculations: a reaction of scorn would throw him into unhesitating championship of her conduct. All this was so clear that, had she been advising any one else, her confidence in the course to be taken might have strengthened the feeblest will; but with the question lying between herself and Amherst--with the vision of those soiled hands literally laid on the spotless fabric of her happiness, judgment wavered, foresight was obscured--she felt tremulously unable to face the steps between exposure and vindication. Her final conclusion was that she must, at any rate, gain time: buy off Wyant till she had been able to tell her story in her own way, and at her own hour, and then defy him when he returned to the assault. The idea that whatever concession she made would be only provisional, helped to excuse the weakness of making it, and enabled her at last, without too painful a sense of falling below her own standards, to reply in a low voice: "If you'll go now, I will send you something next week."
But Wyant did not respond as readily as she had expected. He merely asked, without altering his insolently easy attitude: "How much? Unless it's a good deal, I prefer the letter."
Oh, why could she not cry out: "Leave the house at once--your vulgar threats are nothing to me"--Why could she not even say in her own heart: _I will tell my husband tonight?_
You're afraid, said Wyant, as if answering her thought. "What's the use of being afraid when you can make yourself comfortable so easily? You called me a systematic blackmailer--well, I'm not that yet. Give me a thousand and you'll see the last of me--on what used to be my honour."
Justine's heart sank. She had reached the point of being ready to appeal again to Amherst--but on what pretext could she ask for such a sum?
In a lifeless voice she said: "I could not possibly get more than one or two hundred."
Wyant scrutinized her a moment: her despair must have rung true to him. "Well, you must have something of your own--I saw your jewelry last night at the theatre," he said.
So it had been he--and he had sat there appraising her value like a murderer!
Jewelry--? she faltered.
You had a thumping big sapphire--wasn't it?--with diamonds round it.
It was her only jewel--Amherst's marriage gift. She would have preferred a less valuable present, but his mother had persuaded her to accept it, saying that it was the bride's duty to adorn herself for the bridegroom.
I will give you nothing-- she was about to exclaim; when suddenly her eyes fell on the clock. If Amherst had caught the two o'clock express he would be at the house within the hour; and the only thing that seemed of consequence now, was that he should not meet Wyant. Supposing she still found courage to refuse--there was no knowing how long the humiliating scene might be prolonged: and she must be rid of the creature at any cost. After all, she seldom wore the sapphire--months might pass without its absence being noted by Amherst's careless eye; and if Wyant should pawn it, she might somehow save money to buy it back before it was missed. She went through these calculations with feverish rapidity; then she turned again to Wyant.
You won't come back--ever?
I swear I won't, he said.
He moved away toward the window, as if to spare her; and she turned and slowly left the room.
She never forgot the moments that followed. Once outside the door she was in such haste that she stumbled on the stairs, and had to pause on the landing to regain her breath. In her room she found one of the housemaids busy, and at first could think of no pretext for dismissing her. Then she bade the woman go down and send the brougham away, telling the coachman to call for Miss Cicely at six.
Left alone, she bolted the door, and as if with a thief's hand, opened her wardrobe, unlocked her jewel-box, and drew out the sapphire in its flat morocco case. She restored the box to its place, the key to its ring--then she opened the case and looked at the sapphire. As she did so, a little tremor ran over her neck and throat, and closing her eyes she felt her husband's kiss, and the touch of his hands as he fastened on the jewel.
She unbolted the door, listened intently on the landing, and then went slowly down the stairs. None of the servants were in sight, yet as she reached the lower hall she was conscious that the air had grown suddenly colder, as though the outer door had just been opened. She paused, and listened again. There was a sound of talking in the drawing-room. Could it be that in her absence a visitor had been admitted? The possibility frightened her at first--then she welcomed it as an unexpected means of ridding herself of her tormentor.
She opened the drawing-room door, and saw her husband talking with Wyant.
AMHERST, his back to the threshold, sat at a table writing: Wyant stood a few feet away, staring down at the fire.
Neither had heard the door open; and before they were aware of her entrance Justine had calculated that she must have been away for at least five minutes, and that in that space of time almost anything might have passed between them.
For a moment the power of connected thought left her; then her heart gave a bound of relief. She said to herself that Wyant had doubtless made some allusion to his situation, and that her husband, conscious only of a great debt of gratitude, had at once sat down to draw a cheque for him. The idea was so reassuring that it restored all her clearness of thought.
Wyant was the first to see her. He made an abrupt movement, and Amherst, rising, turned and put an envelope in his hand.
There, my dear fellow----
As he turned he caught sight of his wife.
I caught the twelve o'clock train after all--you got my second wire? he asked.
No, she faltered, pressing her left hand, with the little case in it, close to the folds of her dress.
I was afraid not. There was a bad storm at Hanaford, and they said there might be a delay.
At the same moment she found Wyant advancing with extended hand, and understood that he had concealed the fact of having already seen her. She accepted the cue, and shook his hand, murmuring: "How do you do?"
Amherst looked at her, perhaps struck by her manner.
You have not seen Dr. Wyant since Lynbrook?
No, she answered, thankful to have this pretext for her emotion.
I have been telling him that he should not have left us so long without news--especially as he has been ill, and things have gone rather badly with him. But I hope we can help now. He has heard that Saint Christopher's is looking for a house-physician for the paying patients' wing, and as Mr. Langhope is away I have given him a line to Mrs. Ansell.
Extremely kind of you, Wyant murmured, passing his hand over his forehead.
Justine stood silent. She wondered that her husband had not noticed that tremulous degraded hand. But he was always so blind to externals--and he had no medical experience to sharpen his perceptions.
Suddenly she felt impelled to speak "I am sorry Dr. Wyant has been--unfortunate. Of course you will want to do everything to help him; but would it not be better to wait till Mr. Langhope comes back?"
Wyant thinks the delay might make him lose the place. It seems the board meets tomorrow. And Mrs. Ansell really knows much more about it. Isn't she the secretary of the ladies' committee?
I'm not sure--I believe so. But surely Mr. Langhope should be consulted.
She felt Wyant's face change: his eyes settled on her in a threatening stare.
Amherst looked at her also, and there was surprise in his glance. "I think I can answer for my father-in-law. He feels as strongly as I do how much we all owe to Dr. Wyant."
He seldom spoke of Mr. Langhope as his father-in-law, and the chance designation seemed to mark a closer tie between them, to exclude Justine from what was after all a family affair. For a moment she felt tempted to accept the suggestion, and let the responsibility fall where it would. But it would fall on Amherst--and that was intolerable.
I think you ought to wait, she insisted.
An embarrassed silence settled on the three.
Wyant broke it by advancing toward Amherst. "I shall never forget your kindness," he said; "and I hope to prove to Mrs. Amherst that it's not misplaced."
The words were well chosen, and well spoken; Justine saw that they produced a good effect. Amherst grasped the physician's hand with a smile. "My dear fellow, I wish I could do more. Be sure to call on me again if you want help."
Oh, you've put me on my feet, said Wyant gratefully.
He bowed slightly to Justine and turned to go; but as he reached the threshold she moved after him.
Dr. Wyant--you must give back that letter.
He stopped short with a whitening face.
She felt Amherst's eyes on her again; and she said desperately, addressing him: "Dr. Wyant understands my reasons."
Her husband's glance turned abruptly to Wyant. "Do you?" he asked after a pause.
Wyant looked from one to the other. The moisture came out on his forehead, and he passed his hand over it again. "Yes," he said in a dry voice. "Mrs. Amherst wants me farther off--out of New York."
Out of New York? What do you mean?
Justine interposed hastily, before the answer could come. "It is because Dr. Wyant is not in condition--for such a place--just at present."
But he assures me he is quite well.
There was another silence; and again Wyant broke in, this time with a slight laugh. "I can explain what Mrs. Amherst means; she intends to accuse me of the morphine habit. And I can explain her reason for doing so--she wants me out of the way."
Amherst turned on the speaker; and, as she had foreseen, his look was terrible. "You haven't explained that yet," he said.
Well--I can. Wyant waited another moment. "I know too much about her," he declared.
There was a low exclamation from Justine, and Amherst strode toward Wyant. "You infernal blackguard!" he cried.
Oh, gently---- Wyant muttered, flinching back from his outstretched arm.
My wife's wish is sufficient. Give me back that letter.
Wyant straightened himself. "No, by God, I won't!" he retorted furiously. "I didn't ask you for it till you offered to help me; but I won't let it be taken back without a word, like a thief that you'd caught with your umbrella. If your wife won't explain I will. She's, afraid I'll talk about what happened at Lynbrook."
Amherst's arm fell to his side. "At Lynbrook?"
Behind him there was a sound of inarticulate appeal--but he took no notice.
Yes. It's she who used morphia--but not on herself. She gives it to other people. She gave an overdose to Mrs. Amherst.
Amherst looked at him confusedly. "An overdose?"
Yes--purposely, I mean. And I came into the room at the wrong time. I can prove that Mrs. Amherst died of morphia-poisoning.
John! Justine gasped out, pressing between them.
Amherst gently put aside the hand with which she had caught his arm. "Wait a moment: this can't rest here. You can't want it to," he said to her in an undertone.
Why do you care...for what he says...when I don't? she breathed back with trembling lips.
You can see I am not wanted here, Wyant threw in with a sneer.
Amherst remained silent for a brief space; then he turned his eyes once more to his wife.
Justine lifted her face: it looked small and spent, like an extinguished taper.
It's true, she said.
True?
I _did_ give...an overdose...intentionally, when I knew there was no hope, and when the surgeons said she might go on suffering. She was very strong...and I couldn't bear it...you couldn't have borne it....
There was another silence; then she went on in a stronger voice, looking straight at her husband: "And now will you send this man away?"
Amherst glanced at Wyant without moving. "Go," he said curtly.
Wyant, instead, moved a step nearer. "Just a minute, please. It's only fair to hear my side. Your wife says there was no hope; yet the day before she...gave the dose, Dr. Garford told her in my presence that Mrs. Amherst might live."
Again Amherst's eyes addressed themselves slowly to Justine; and she forced her lips to articulate an answer.
Dr. Garford said...one could never tell...but I know he didn't believe in the chance of recovery...no one did.
Dr. Garford is dead, said Wyant grimly.
Amherst strode up to him again. "You scoundrel--leave the house!" he commanded.
But still Wyant sneeringly stood his ground. "Not till I've finished. I can't afford to let myself be kicked out like a dog because I happen to be in the way. Every doctor knows that in cases of spinal lesion recovery is becoming more and more frequent--if the patient survives the third week there's every reason to hope. Those are the facts as they would appear to any surgeon. If they're not true, why is Mrs. Amherst afraid of having them stated? Why has she been paying me for nearly a year to keep them quiet?"
Oh---- Justine moaned.
I never thought of talking till luck went against me. Then I asked her for help--and reminded her of certain things. After that she kept me supplied pretty regularly. He thrust his shaking hand into an inner pocket. "Here are her envelopes...Quebec...Montreal...Saranac...I know just where you went on your honeymoon. She had to write often, because the sums were small. Why did she do it, if she wasn't afraid? And why did she go upstairs just now to fetch me something? If you don't believe me, ask her what she's got in her hand."
Amherst did not heed this injunction. He stood motionless, gripping the back of a chair, as if his next gesture might be to lift and hurl it at the speaker.
Ask her---- Wyant repeated.
Amherst turned his head slowly, and his dull gaze rested on his wife. His face looked years older--lips and eyes moved as heavily as an old man's.
As he looked at her, Justine came forward without speaking, and laid the little morocco case in his hand. He held it there a moment, as if hardly understanding her action--then he tossed it on the table at his elbow, and walked up to Wyant.
You hound, he said--"now go!"
WHEN Wyant had left the room, and the house-door had closed on him, Amherst spoke to his wife.
Come upstairs, he said.
Justine followed him, scarcely conscious where she went, but moving already with a lighter tread. Part of her weight of misery had been lifted with Wyant's going. She had suffered less from the fear of what her husband might think than from the shame of making her avowal in her defamer's presence. And her faith in Amherst's comprehension had begun to revive. He had dismissed Wyant with scorn and horror--did not that show that he was on her side already? And how many more arguments she had at her call! Her brain hummed with them as she followed him up the stairs.
In her bedroom he closed the door and stood motionless, the same heavy half-paralyzed look on his face. It frightened her and she went up to him.
John! she said timidly.
He put his hand to his head. "Wait a moment----" he returned; and she waited, her heart slowly sinking again.
The moment over, he seemed to recover his power of movement. He crossed the room and threw himself into the armchair near the hearth.
Now tell me everything.
He sat thrown back, his eyes fixed on the fire, and the vertical lines between his brows forming a deep scar in his white face.
Justine moved nearer, and touched his arm beseechingly. "Won't you look at me?"
He turned his head slowly, as if with an effort, and his eyes rested reluctantly on hers.
Oh, not like that! she exclaimed.
He seemed to make a stronger effort at self-control. "Please don't heed me--but say what there is to say," he said in a level voice, his gaze on the fire.
She stood before him, her arms hanging down, her clasped fingers twisting restlessly.
I don't know that there is much to say--beyond what I've told you.
There was a slight sound in Amherst's throat, like the ghost of a derisive laugh. After another interval he said: "I wish to hear exactly what happened."
She seated herself on the edge of a chair near by, bending forward, with hands interlocked and arms extended on her knees--every line reaching out to him, as though her whole slight body were an arrow winged with pleadings. It was a relief to speak at last, even face to face with the stony image that sat in her husband's place; and she told her story, detail by detail, omitting nothing, exaggerating nothing, speaking slowly, clearly, with precision, aware that the bare facts were her strongest argument.
Amherst, as he listened, shifted his position once, raising his hand so that it screened his face; and in that attitude he remained when she had ended.
As she waited for him to speak, Justine realized that her heart had been alive with tremulous hopes. All through her narrative she had counted on a murmur of perception, an exclamation of pity: she had felt sure of melting the stony image. But Amherst said no word.
At length he spoke, still without turning his head. "You have not told me why you kept this from me."
A sob formed in her throat, and she had to wait to steady her voice.
No--that was my wrong--my weakness. When I did it I never thought of being afraid to tell you--I had talked it over with you in my own mind...so often...before....
Well?
Then--- when you came back it was harder...though I was still sure you would approve me.
Why harder?
Because at first--at Lynbrook--I _could not_ tell it all over, in detail, as I have now...it was beyond human power...and without doing so, I couldn't make it all clear to you...and so should only have added to your pain. If you had been there you would have done as I did.... I felt sure of that from the first. But coming afterward, you couldn't judge...no one who was not there could judge...and I wanted to spare you....
And afterward?
She had shrunk in advance from this question, and she could not answer it at once. To gain time she echoed it. "Afterward?"
Did it never occur to you, when we met later--when you first went to Mr. Langhope----?
To tell you then? No--because by that time I had come to see that I could never be quite sure of making you understand. No one who was not there at the time could know what it was to see her suffer.
You thought it all over, then--decided definitely against telling me?
I did not have to think long. I felt I had done right--I still feel so--and I was sure you would feel so, if you were in the same circumstances.
There was another pause. Then Amherst said: "And last September--at Hanaford?"
It was the word for which she had waited--the word of her inmost fears. She felt the blood mount to her face.
Did you see no difference--no special reason for telling me then?
Yes---- she faltered.
Yet you said nothing.
No.
Silence again. Her eyes strayed to the clock, and some dim association of ideas told her that Cicely would soon be coming in.
Why did you say nothing?
He lowered his hand and turned toward her as he spoke; and she looked up and faced him.
Because I regarded the question as settled. I had decided it in my own mind months before, and had never regretted my decision. I should have thought it morbid...unnatural...to go over the whole subject again...to let it affect a situation that had come about...so much later...so unexpectedly.
Did you never feel that, later, if I came to know--if others came to know--it might be difficult----?
No; for I didn't care for the others--and I believed that, whatever your own feelings were, you would know I had done what I thought right.
She spoke the words proudly, strongly, and for the first time the hard lines of his face relaxed, and a slight tremor crossed it.
If you believed this, why have you been letting that cur blackmail you?
Because when he began I saw for the first time that what I had done might be turned against me by--by those who disliked our marriage. And I was afraid for my happiness. That was my weakness...it is what I am suffering for now.
_Suffering_! he echoed ironically, as though she had presumed to apply to herself a word of which he had the grim monopoly. He rose and took a few aimless steps; then he halted before her.
That day--last month--when you asked me for money...was it...?
Yes---- she said, her head sinking.
He laughed. "You couldn't tell me--but you could use my money to bribe that fellow to conspire with you!"
I had none of my own.
No--nor I either! You used _her_ money.--God! he groaned, turning away with clenched hands.
Justine had risen also, and she stood motionless, her hands clasped against her breast, in the drawn shrinking attitude of a fugitive overtaken by a blinding storm. He moved back to her with an appealing gesture.
And you didn't see--it didn't occur to you--that your doing...as you did...was an obstacle--an insurmountable obstacle--to our ever ...?
She cut him short with an indignant cry. "No! No! for it was _not_. How could it have anything to do with what...came after...with you or me? I did it only for Bessy--it concerned only Bessy!"
Ah, don't name her! broke from him harshly, and she drew back, cut to the heart.
There was another pause, during which he seemed to fall into a kind of dazed irresolution, his head on his breast, as though unconscious of her presence. Then he roused himself and went to the door.
As he passed her she sprang after him. "John--John! Is that all you have to say?"
What more is there?
What more? Everything!--What right have you to turn from me as if I were a murderess? I did nothing but what your own reason, your own arguments, have justified a hundred times! I made a mistake in not telling you at once--but a mistake is not a crime. It can't be your real feeling that turns you from me--it must be the dread of what other people would think! But when have you cared for what other people thought? When have your own actions been governed by it?
He moved another step without speaking, and she caught him by the arm. "No! you sha'n't go--not like that!--Wait!"
She turned and crossed the room. On the lower shelf of the little table by her bed a few books were ranged: she stooped and drew one hurriedly forth, opening it at the fly-leaf as she went back to Amherst.
There--read that. The book was at Lynbrook--in your room--and I came across it by chance the very day....
It was the little volume of Bacon which she was thrusting at him. He took it with a bewildered look, as if scarcely following what she said.
Read it--read it! she commanded; and mechanically he read out the words he had written.
_La vraie morale se moque de la morale.... We perish because we follow other men's examples.... Socrates called the opinions of the many Lami?._--Good God! he exclaimed, flinging the book from him with a gesture of abhorrence.
Justine watched him with panting lips, her knees trembling under her. "But you wrote it--you wrote it! I thought you meant it!" she cried, as the book spun across a table and dropped to the floor.
He looked at her coldly, almost apprehensively, as if she had grown suddenly dangerous and remote; then he turned and walked out of the room.
* * * * *
The striking of the clock roused her. She rose to her feet, rang the bell, and told the maid, through the door, that she had a headache, and was unable to see Miss Cicely. Then she turned back into the room, and darkness closed on her. She was not the kind to take grief passively--it drove her in anguished pacings up and down the floor. She walked and walked till her legs flagged under her; then she dropped stupidly into the chair where Amherst had sat....
All her world had crumbled about her. It was as if some law of mental gravity had been mysteriously suspended, and every firmly-anchored conviction, every accepted process of reasoning, spun disconnectedly through space. Amherst had not understood her--worse still, he had judged her as the world might judge her! The core of her misery was there. With terrible clearness she saw the suspicion that had crossed his mind--the suspicion that she had kept silence in the beginning because she loved him, and feared to lose him if she spoke.
And what if it were true? What if her unconscious guilt went back even farther than his thought dared to track it? She could not now recall a time when she had not loved him. Every chance meeting with him, from their first brief talk at Hanaford, stood out embossed and glowing against the blur of lesser memories. Was it possible that she had loved him during Bessy's life--that she had even, sub-consciously, blindly, been urged by her feeling for him to perform the act?
But she shook herself free from this morbid horror--the rebound of health was always prompt in her, and her mind instinctively rejected every form of moral poison. No! Her motive had been normal, sane and justifiable--completely justifiable. Her fault lay in having dared to rise above conventional restrictions, her mistake in believing that her husband could rise with her. These reflections steadied her but they did not bring much comfort. For her whole life was centred in Amherst, and she saw that he would never be able to free himself from the traditional view of her act. In looking back, and correcting her survey of his character in the revealing light of the last hours, she perceived that, like many men of emancipated thought, he had remained subject to the old conventions of feeling. And he had probably never given much thought to women till he met her--had always been content to deal with them in the accepted currency of sentiment. After all, it was the currency they liked best, and for which they offered their prettiest wares!
But what of the intellectual accord between himself and her? She had not been deceived in that! He and she had really been wedded in mind as well as in heart. But until now there had not arisen in their lives one of those searching questions which call into play emotions rooted far below reason and judgment, in the dark primal depths of inherited feeling. It is easy to judge impersonal problems intellectually, turning on them the full light of acquired knowledge; but too often one must still grope one's way through the personal difficulty by the dim taper carried in long-dead hands....
But was there then no hope of lifting one's individual life to a clearer height of conduct? Must one be content to think for the race, and to feel only--feel blindly and incoherently--for one's self? And was it not from such natures as Amherst's--natures in which independence of judgment was blent with strong human sympathy--that the liberating impulse should come?
Her mind grew weary of revolving in this vain circle of questions. The fact was that, in their particular case, Amherst had not risen above prejudice and emotion; that, though her act was one to which his intellectual sanction was given, he had turned from her with instinctive repugnance, had dishonoured her by the most wounding suspicions. The tie between them was forever stained and debased.
Justine's long hospital-discipline made it impossible for her to lose consciousness of the lapse of time, or to let her misery thicken into mental stupor. She could not help thinking and moving; and she presently lifted herself to her feet, turned on the light, and began to prepare for dinner. It would be terrible to face her husband across Mr. Langhope's pretty dinner-table, and afterward in the charming drawing-room, with its delicate old ornaments and intimate luxurious furniture; but she could not continue to sit motionless in the dark: it was her innermost instinct to pick herself up and go on.
While she dressed she listened anxiously for Amherst's step in the next room; but there was no sound, and when she dragged herself downstairs the drawing-room was empty, and the parlour-maid, after a decent delay, came to ask if dinner should be postponed.
She said no, murmuring some vague pretext for her husband's absence, and sitting alone through the succession of courses which composed the brief but carefully-studied _menu_. When this ordeal was over she returned to the drawing-room and took up a book. It chanced to be a new volume on labour problems, which Amherst must have brought back with him from Westmore; and it carried her thoughts instantly to the mills. Would this disaster poison their work there as well as their personal relation? Would he think of her as carrying contamination even into the task their love had illumined?
The hours went on without his returning, and at length it occurred to her that he might have taken the night train to Hanaford. Her heart contracted at the thought: she remembered--though every nerve shrank from the analogy--his sudden flight at another crisis in his life, and she felt obscurely that if he escaped from her now she would never recover her hold on him. But could he be so cruel--could he wish any one to suffer as she was suffering?
At ten o'clock she could endure the drawing-room no longer, and went up to her room again. She undressed slowly, trying to prolong the process as much as possible, to put off the period of silence and inaction which would close in on her when she lay down on her bed. But at length the dreaded moment came--there was nothing more between her and the night. She crept into bed and put out the light; but as she slipped between the cold sheets a trembling seized her, and after a moment she drew on her dressing-gown again and groped her way to the lounge by the fire.
She pushed the lounge closer to the hearth and lay down, still shivering, though she had drawn the quilted coverlet up to her chin. She lay there a long time, with closed eyes, in a mental darkness torn by sudden flashes of memory. In one of these flashes a phrase of Amherst's stood out--a word spoken at Westmore, on the day of the opening of the Emergency Hospital, about a good-looking young man who had called to see her. She remembered Amherst's boyish burst of jealousy, his sudden relief at the thought that the visitor might have been Wyant. And no doubt it _was_ Wyant--Wyant who had come to Hanaford to threaten her, and who, baffled by her non-arrival, or for some other unexplained reason, had left again without carrying out his purpose.
It was dreadful to think by how slight a chance her first draught of happiness had escaped that drop of poison; yet, when she understood, her inward cry was: "If it had happened, my dearest need not have suffered!"... Already she was feeling Amherst's pain more than her own, understanding that it was harder to bear than hers because it was at war with all the reflective part of his nature.
As she lay there, her face pressed into the cushions, she heard a sound through the silent house--the opening and closing of the outer door. She turned cold, and lay listening with strained ears.... Yes; now there was a step on the stairs--her husband's step! She heard him turn into his own room. The throbs of her heart almost deafened her--she only distinguished confusedly that he was moving about within, so close that it was as if she felt his touch. Then her door opened and he entered.
He stumbled slightly in the darkness before he found the switch of the lamp; and as he bent over it she saw that his face was flushed, and that his eyes had an excited light which, in any one less abstemious, might almost have seemed like the effect of wine.
Are you awake? he asked.
She started up against the cushions, her black hair streaming about her small ghostly face.
Yes.
He walked over to the lounge and dropped into the low chair beside it.
I've given that cur a lesson he won't forget, he exclaimed, breathing hard, the redness deepening in his face.
She turned on him in joy and trembling. "John!--Oh, John! You didn't follow him? Oh, what happened? What have you done?"
No. I didn't follow him. But there are some things that even the powers above can't stand. And so they managed to let me run across him--by the merest accident--and I gave him something to remember.
He spoke in a strong clear voice that had a brightness like the brightness in his eyes. She felt its heat in her veins--the primitive woman in her glowed at contact with the primitive man. But reflection chilled her the next moment.
But why--why? Oh, how could you? Where did it happen--oh, not in the street?
As she questioned him, there rose before her the terrified vision of a crowd gathering--the police, newspapers, a hideous publicity. He must have been mad to do it--and yet he must have done it because he loved her!
No--no. Don't be afraid. The powers looked after that too. There was no one about--and I don't think he'll talk much about it.
She trembled, fearing yet adoring him. Nothing could have been more unlike the Amherst she fancied she knew than this act of irrational anger which had magically lifted the darkness from his spirit; yet, magically also, it gave him back to her, made them one flesh once more. And suddenly the pressure of opposed emotions became too strong, and she burst into tears.
She wept painfully, violently, with the resistance of strong natures unused to emotional expression; till at length, through the tumult of her tears, she felt her husband's reassuring touch.
Justine, he said, speaking once more in his natural voice.
She raised her face from her hands, and they looked at each other.
Justine--this afternoon--I said things I didn't mean to say.
Her lips parted, but her throat was still full of sobs, and she could only look at him while the tears ran down.
I believe I understand now, he continued, in the same quiet tone.
Her hand shrank from his clasp, and she began to tremble again. "Oh, if you only _believe_...if you're not sure...don't pretend to be!"
He sat down beside her and drew her into his arms. "I am sure," he whispered, holding her close, and pressing his lips against her face and hair.
Oh, my husband--my husband! You've come back to me?
He answered her with more kisses, murmuring through them: "Poor child--poor child--poor Justine...." while he held her fast.
With her face against him she yielded to the childish luxury of murmuring out unjustified fears. "I was afraid you had gone back to Hanaford----"
Tonight? To Hanaford?
To tell your mother.
She felt a contraction of the arm embracing her, as though a throb of pain had stiffened it.
I shall never tell any one, he said abruptly; but as he felt in her a responsive shrinking he gathered her close again, whispering through the hair that fell about her cheek: "Don't talk, dear...let us never talk of it again...." And in the clasp of his arms her terror and anguish subsided, giving way, not to the deep peace of tranquillized thought, but to a confused well-being that lulled all thought to sleep.
BUT thought could never be long silent between them; and Justine's triumph lasted but a day.
With its end she saw what it had been made of: the ascendency of youth and sex over his subjugated judgment. Her first impulse was to try and maintain it--why not use the protective arts with which love inspired her? She who lived so keenly in the brain could live as intensely in her feelings; her quick imagination tutored her looks and words, taught her the spells to weave about shorn giants. And for a few days she and Amherst lost themselves in this self-evoked cloud of passion, both clinging fast to the visible, the palpable in their relation, as if conscious already that its finer essence had fled.
Amherst made no allusion to what had passed, asked for no details, offered no reassurances--behaved as if the whole episode had been effaced from his mind. And from Wyant there came no sound: he seemed to have disappeared from life as he had from their talk.
Toward the end of the week Amherst announced that he must return to Hanaford; and Justine at once declared her intention of going with him.
He seemed surprised, disconcerted almost; and for the first time the shadow of what had happened fell visibly between them.
But ought you to leave Cicely before Mr. Langhope comes back? he suggested.
He will be here in two days.
But he will expect to find you.
It is almost the first of April. We are to have Cicely with us for the summer. There is no reason why I should not go back to my work at Westmore.
There was in fact no reason that he could produce; and the next day they returned to Hanaford together.
With her perceptions strung to the last pitch of sensitiveness, she felt a change in Amherst as soon as they re-entered Bessy's house. He was still scrupulously considerate, almost too scrupulously tender; but with a tinge of lassitude, like a man who tries to keep up under the stupefying approach of illness. And she began to hate the power by which she held him. It was not thus they had once walked together, free in mind though so linked in habit and feeling; when their love was not a deadening drug but a vivifying element that cleared thought instead of stifling it. There were moments when she felt that open alienation would be easier, because it would be nearer the truth. And at such moments she longed to speak, to beg him to utter his mind, to go with her once for all into the depths of the subject they continued to avoid. But at the last her heart always failed her: she could not face the thought of losing him, of hearing him speak estranging words to her.
They had been at Hanaford for about ten days when, one morning at breakfast, Amherst uttered a sudden exclamation over a letter he was reading.
What is it? she asked in a tremor.
He had grown very pale, and was pushing the hair from his forehead with the gesture habitual to him in moments of painful indecision.
What is it? Justine repeated, her fear growing.
Nothing---- he began, thrusting the letter under the pile of envelopes by his plate; but she continued to look at him anxiously, till she drew his eyes to hers.
Mr. Langhope writes that they've appointed Wyant to Saint Christopher's, he said abruptly.
Oh, the letter--we forgot the letter! she cried.
Yes--we forgot the letter.
But how dare he----?
Amherst said nothing, but the long silence between them seemed full of ironic answers, till she brought out, hardly above her breath: "What shall you do?"
Write at once--tell Mr. Langhope he's not fit for the place.
Of course---- she murmured.
He went on tearing open his other letters, and glancing at their contents. She leaned back in her chair, her cup of coffee untasted, listening to the recurrent crackle of torn paper as he tossed aside one letter after another.
Presently he rose from his seat, and as she followed him from the dining-room she noticed that his breakfast had also remained untasted. He gathered up his letters and walked toward the smoking-room; and after a moment's hesitation she joined him.
John, she said from the threshold.
He was just seating himself at his desk, but he turned to her with an obvious effort at kindness which made the set look of his face the more marked.
She closed the door and went up to him.
If you write that to Mr. Langhope--Dr. Wyant will--will tell him, she said.
Yes--we must be prepared for that.
She was silent, and Amherst flung himself down on the leather ottoman against the wall. She stood before him, clasping and unclasping her hands in speechless distress.
What would you have me do? he asked at length, almost irritably.
I only thought...he told me he would keep straight...if he only had a chance, she faltered out.
Amherst lifted his head slowly, and looked at her. "You mean--I am to do nothing? Is that it?"
She moved nearer to him with beseeching eyes. "I can't bear it.... I can't bear that others should come between us," she broke out passionately.
He made no answer, but she could see a look of suffering cross his face, and coming still closer, she sank down on the ottoman, laying her hand on his. "John...oh, John, spare me," she whispered.
For a moment his hand lay quiet under hers; then he drew it out, and enclosed her trembling fingers.
Very well--I'll give him a chance--I'll do nothing, he said, suddenly putting his other arm about her.
The reaction caught her by the throat, forcing out a dry sob or two; and as she pressed her face against him he raised it up and gently kissed her.
But even as their lips met she felt that they were sealing a treaty with dishonour. That his kiss should come to mean that to her! It was unbearable--worse than any personal pain--the thought of dragging him down to falsehood through her weakness.
She drew back and rose to her feet, putting aside his detaining hand.
No--no! What am I saying? It can't be--you must tell the truth. Her voice gathered strength as she spoke. "Oh, forget what I said--I didn't mean it!"
But again he seemed sunk in inaction, like a man over whom some baneful lethargy is stealing.
John--John--forget! she repeated urgently.
He looked up at her. "You realize what it will mean?"
Yes--I realize.... But it must be.... And it will make no difference between us...will it?
No--no. Why should it? he answered apathetically.
Then write--tell Mr. Langhope not to give him the place. I want it over.
He rose slowly to his feet, without looking at her again, and walked over to the desk. She sank down on the ottoman and watched him with burning eyes while he drew forth a sheet of note-paper and began to write.
But after he had written a few words he laid down his pen, and swung his chair about so that he faced her.
I can't do it in this way, he exclaimed.
How then? What do you mean? she said, starting up.
He looked at her. "Do you want the story to come from Wyant?"
Oh---- She looked back at him with sudden insight. "You mean to tell Mr. Langhope yourself?"
Yes. I mean to take the next train to town and tell him.
Her trembling increased so much that she had to rest her hands against the edge of the ottoman to steady herself. "But if...if after all...Wyant should not speak?"
Well--if he shouldn't? Could you bear to owe our safety to _him_?
Safety!
It comes to that, doesn't it, if _we're_ afraid to speak?
She sat silent, letting the bitter truth of this sink into her till it poured courage into her veins.
Yes--it comes to that, she confessed.
Then you feel as I do?
That you must go----?
That this is intolerable!
The words struck down her last illusion, and she rose and went over to the writing-table. "Yes--go," she said.
He stood up also, and took both her hands, not in a caress, but gravely, almost severely.
Listen, Justine. You must understand exactly what this means--may mean. I am willing to go on as we are now...as long as we can...because I love you...because I would do anything to spare you pain. But if I speak I must say everything--I must follow this thing up to its uttermost consequences. That's what I want to make clear to you.
Her heart sank with a foreboding of new peril. "What consequences?"
Can't you see for yourself--when you look about this house?
This house----?
He dropped her hands and took an abrupt turn across the room.
I owe everything to her, he broke out, "all I am, all I have, all I have been able to give you--and I must go and tell her father that you...."
Stop--stop! she cried, lifting her hands as if to keep off a blow.
No--don't make me stop. We must face it, he said doggedly.
But this--this isn't the truth! You put it as if--almost as if----
Yes--don't finish.--Has it occurred to you that _he_ may think that? Amherst asked with a terrible laugh. But at that she recovered her courage, as she always did when an extreme call was made on it.
No--I don't believe it! If he _does_, it will be because you think it yourself.... Her voice sank, and she lifted her hands and pressed them to her temples. "And if you think it, nothing matters...one way or the other...." She paused, and her voice regained its strength. "That is what I must face before you go: what _you_ think, what _you_ believe of me. You've never told me that."
Amherst, at the challenge, remained silent, while a slow red crept to his cheek-bones.
Haven't I told you by--by what I've done? he said slowly.
No--what you've done has covered up what you thought; and I've helped you cover it--I'm to blame too! But it was not for this that we...that we had that half-year together...not to sink into connivance and evasion! I don't want another hour of sham happiness. I want the truth from you, whatever it is.
He stood motionless, staring moodily at the floor. "Don't you see that's my misery--that I don't know myself?"
You don't know...what you think of me?
Good God, Justine, why do you try to strip life naked? I don't know what's been going on in me these last weeks----
You must know what you think of my motive...for doing what I did.
She saw in his face how he shrank from the least allusion to the act about which their torment revolved. But he forced himself to raise his head and look at her. "I have never--for one moment--questioned your motive--or failed to see that it was justified...under the circumstances...."
Oh, John--John! she broke out in the wild joy of hearing herself absolved; but the next instant her subtle perceptions felt the unconscious reserve behind his admission.
Your mind justifies me--not your heart; isn't _that_ your misery? she said.
He looked at her almost piteously, as if, in the last resort, it was from her that light must come to him. "On my soul, I don't know...I can't tell...it's all dark in me. I know you did what you thought best...if I had been there, I believe I should have asked you to do it...but I wish to God----"
She interrupted him sobbingly. "Oh, I ought never to have let you love me! I ought to have seen that I was cut off from you forever. I have brought you wretchedness when I would have given my life for you! I don't deserve that you should forgive me for that."
Her sudden outbreak seemed to restore his self-possession. He went up to her and took her hand with a quieting touch.
There is no question of forgiveness, Justine. Don't let us torture each other with vain repinings. Our business is to face the thing, and we shall be better for having talked it out. I shall be better, for my part, for having told Mr. Langhope. But before I go I want to be sure that you understand the view he may take...and the effect it will probably have on our future.
Our future? She started. "No, I don't understand."
Amherst paused a moment, as if trying to choose the words least likely to pain her. "Mr. Langhope knows that my marriage was...unhappy; through my fault, he no doubt thinks. And if he chooses to infer that...that you and I may have cared for each other...before...and that it was _because_ there was a chance of recovery that you----"
Oh----
We must face it, he repeated inflexibly. "And you must understand that, if there is the faintest hint of this kind, I shall give up everything here, as soon as it can be settled legally--God, how Tredegar will like the job!--and you and I will have to go and begin life over again...somewhere else."
For an instant a mad hope swelled in her--the vision of escaping with him into new scenes, a new life, away from the coil of memories that bound them down as in a net. But the reaction of reason came at once--she saw him cut off from his chosen work, his career destroyed, his honour clouded, above all--ah, this was what wrung them both!--his task undone, his people flung back into the depths from which he had lifted them. And all through her doing--all because she had clutched at happiness with too rash a hand! The thought stung her to passionate activity of mind--made her resolve to risk anything, dare anything, before she involved him farther in her own ruin. She felt her brain clear gradually, and the thickness dissolve in her throat.
I understand, she said in a low voice, raising her eyes to his.
And you're ready to accept the consequences? Think again before it's too late.
She paused. "That is what I should like...what I wanted to ask you...the time to think."
She saw a slight shade cross his face, as if he had not expected this failure of courage in her; but he said quietly: "You don't want me to go today?"
Not today--give me one more day.
Very well.
She laid a timid hand on his arm. "Please go out to Westmore as usual--as if nothing had happened. And tonight...when you come back...I shall have decided."
Very well, he repeated.
You'll be gone all day?
He glanced at his watch. "Yes--I had meant to be; unless----"
No; I would rather be alone. Good-bye, she said, letting her hand slip softly along his coat-sleeve as he turned to the door.
AT half-past six that afternoon, just as Amherst, on his return from the mills, put the key into his door at Hanaford, Mrs. Ansell, in New York, was being shown into Mr. Langhope's library.
As she entered, her friend rose from his chair by the fire, and turned on her a face so disordered by emotion that she stopped short with an exclamation of alarm.
Henry--what has happened? Why did you send for me?
Because I couldn't go to you. I couldn't trust myself in the streets--in the light of day.
But why? What is it?--Not Cicely----?
He struck both hands upward with a comprehensive gesture. "Cicely--everyone--the whole world!" His clenched fist came down on the table against which he was leaning. "Maria, my girl might have been saved!"
Mrs. Ansell looked at him with growing perturbation. "Saved--Bessy's life? But how? By whom?"
She might have been allowed to live, I mean--to recover. She was killed, Maria; that woman killed her!
Mrs. Ansell, with another cry of bewilderment, let herself drop helplessly into the nearest chair. "In heaven's name, Henry--what woman?"
He seated himself opposite to her, clutching at his stick, and leaning his weight heavily on it--a white dishevelled old man. "I wonder why you ask--just to spare me?"
Their eyes met in a piercing exchange of question and answer, and Mrs. Ansell tried to bring out reasonably: "I ask in order to understand what you are saying."
Well, then, if you insist on keeping up appearances--my daughter-in-law killed my daughter. There you have it. He laughed silently, with a tear on his reddened eye-lids.
Mrs. Ansell groaned. "Henry, you are raving--I understand less and less."
I don't see how I can speak more plainly. She told me so herself, in this room, not an hour ago.
She told you? Who told you?
John Amherst's wife. Told me she'd killed my child. It's as easy as breathing--if you know how to use a morphia-needle.
Light seemed at last to break on his hearer. "Oh, my poor Henry--you mean--she gave too much? There was some dreadful accident?"
There was no accident. She killed my child--killed her deliberately. Don't look at me as if I were a madman. She sat in that chair you're in when she told me.
Justine? Has she been here today? Mrs. Ansell paused in a painful effort to readjust her thoughts. "But _why_ did she tell you?"
That's simple enough. To prevent Wyant's doing it.
Oh---- broke from his hearer, in a long sigh of fear and intelligence. Mr. Langhope looked at her with a smile of miserable exultation.
You knew--you suspected all along?--But now you must speak out! he exclaimed with a sudden note of command.
She sat motionless, as if trying to collect herself. "I know nothing--I only meant--why was this never known before?"
He was upon her at once. "You think--because they understood each other? And now there's been a break between them? He wanted too big a share of the spoils? Oh, it's all so abysmally vile!"
He covered his face with a shaking hand, and Mrs. Ansell remained silent, plunged in a speechless misery of conjecture. At length she regained some measure of her habitual composure, and leaning forward, with her eyes on his face, said in a quiet tone: "If I am to help you, you must try to tell me just what has happened."
He made an impatient gesture. "Haven't I told you? She found that her accomplice meant to speak, and rushed to town to forestall him."
Mrs. Ansell reflected. "But why--with his place at Saint Christopher's secured--did Dr. Wyant choose this time to threaten her--if, as you imagine, he's an accomplice?"
Because he's a drug-taker, and she didn't wish him to have the place.
She didn't wish it? But that does not look as if she were afraid. She had only to hold her tongue!
Mr. Langhope laughed sardonically. "It's not quite so simple. Amherst was coming to town to tell me."
Ah--_he_ knows?
Yes--and she preferred that I should have her version first.
And what is her version?
The furrows of misery deepened in Mr. Langhope's face. "Maria--don't ask too much of me! I can't go over it again. She says she wanted to spare my child--she says the doctors were keeping her alive, torturing her uselessly, as a...a sort of scientific experiment.... She forced on me the hideous details...."
Mrs. Ansell waited a moment.
Well! May it not be true?
Wyant's version is different. _He_ says Bessy would have recovered--he says Garford thought so too.
And what does she answer? She denies it?
No. She admits that Garford was in doubt. But she says the chance was too remote--the pain too bad...that's her cue, naturally!
Mrs. Ansell, leaning back in her chair, with hands meditatively stretched along its arms, gave herself up to silent consideration of the fragmentary statements cast before her. The long habit of ministering to her friends in moments of perplexity and distress had given her an almost judicial keenness in disentangling and coordinating facts incoherently presented, and in seizing on the thread of motive that connected them; but she had never before been confronted with a situation so poignant in itself, and bearing so intimately on her personal feelings; and she needed time to free her thoughts from the impending rush of emotion.
At last she raised her head and said: "Why did Mr. Amherst let her come to you, instead of coming himself?"
He knows nothing of her being here. She persuaded him to wait a day, and as soon as he had gone to the mills this morning she took the first train to town.
Ah---- Mrs. Ansell murmured thoughtfully; and Mr. Langhope rejoined, with a conclusive gesture: "Do you want more proofs of panic-stricken guilt?"
Oh, guilt-- His friend revolved her large soft muff about a drooping hand. "There's so much still to understand."
Your mind does not, as a rule, work so slowly! he said with some asperity; but she paid no heed to his tone.
Amherst, for instance--how long has he known of this? she continued.
A week or two only--she made that clear.
And what is his attitude?
Ah--that, I conjecture, is just what she means to keep us from knowing!
You mean she's afraid----?
Mr. Langhope gathered his haggard brows in a frown. "She's afraid, of course--mortally--I never saw a woman more afraid. I only wonder she had the courage to face me."
Ah--that's it! Why _did_ she face you? To extenuate her act--to give you her version, because she feared his might be worse? Do you gather that that was her motive?
It was Mr. Langhope's turn to hesitate. He furrowed the thick Turkey rug with the point of his ebony stick, pausing once or twice to revolve it gimlet-like in a gap of the pile.
Not her avowed motive, naturally.
Well--at least, then, let me have that.
Her avowed motive? Oh, she'd prepared one, of course--trust her to have a dozen ready! The one she produced was--simply the desire to protect her husband.
Her husband? Does _he_ too need protection?
My God, if he takes her side----! At any rate, her fear seemed to be that what she had done might ruin him; might cause him to feel--as well he may!--that the mere fact of being her husband makes his situation as Cicely's step-father, as my son-in-law, intolerable. And she came to clear him, as it were--to find out, in short, on what terms I should be willing to continue my present relations with him as though this hideous thing had not been known to me.
Mrs. Ansell raised her head quickly. "Well--and what were your terms?"
He hesitated. "She spared me the pain of proposing any--I had only to accept hers."
Hers?
That she should disappear altogether from my sight--and from the child's, naturally. Good heaven, I should like to include Amherst in that! But I'm tied hand and foot, as you see, by Cicely's interests; and I'm bound to say she exonerated him completely--completely!
Mrs. Ansell was again silent, but a swift flight of thoughts traversed her drooping face. "But if you are to remain on the old terms with her husband, how is she to disappear out of your life without also disappearing out of his?"
Mr. Langhope gave a slight laugh. "I leave her to work out that problem."
And you think Amherst will consent to such conditions?
He's not to know of them.
The unexpectedness of the reply reduced Mrs. Ansell to a sound of inarticulate interrogation; and Mr. Langhope continued: "Not at first, that is. She had thought it all out--foreseen everything; and she wrung from me--I don't yet know how!--a promise that when I saw him I would make it appear that I cleared him completely, not only of any possible complicity, or whatever you choose to call it, but of any sort of connection with the matter in my thoughts of him. I am, in short, to let him feel that he and I are to continue on the old footing--and I agreed, on the condition of her effacing herself somehow--of course on some other pretext."
Some other pretext? But what conceivable pretext? My poor friend, he adores her!
Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. "We haven't seen him since this became known to him. _She_ has; and she let slip that he was horror-struck."
Mrs. Ansell looked up with a quick exclamation. "Let slip? Isn't it much more likely that she forced it on you--emphasized it to the last limit of credulity?" She sank her hands to the arms of the chair, and exclaimed, looking him straight in the eyes: "You say she was frightened? It strikes me she was dauntless!"
Mr. Langhope stared a moment; then he said, with an ironic shrug: "No doubt, then, she counted on its striking me too."
Mrs. Ansell breathed a shuddering sigh. "Oh, I understand your feeling as you do--I'm deep in the horror of it myself. But I can't help seeing that this woman might have saved herself--and that she's chosen to save her husband instead. What I don't see, from what I know of him," she musingly proceeded, "is how, on any imaginable pretext, she will induce him to accept the sacrifice."
Mr. Langhope made a resentful movement. "If that's the only point your mind dwells on----!"
Mrs. Ansell looked up. "It doesn't dwell anywhere as yet--except, my poor Henry," she murmured, rising to move toward him, and softly laying her hand on his bent shoulder--"except on your distress and misery--on the very part I can't yet talk of, can't question you about...."
He let her hand rest there a moment; then he turned, and drawing it into his own tremulous fingers, pressed it silently, with a clinging helpless grasp that drew the tears to her eyes.
* * * * *
Justine Brent, in her earliest girlhood, had gone through one of those emotional experiences that are the infantile diseases of the heart. She had fancied herself beloved of a youth of her own age; had secretly returned his devotion, and had seen it reft from her by another. Such an incident, as inevitable as the measles, sometimes, like that mild malady, leaves traces out of all proportion to its actual virulence. The blow fell on Justine with tragic suddenness, and she reeled under it, thinking darkly of death, and renouncing all hopes of future happiness. Her ready pen often beguiled her into recording her impressions, and she now found an escape from despair in writing the history of a damsel similarly wronged. In her tale, the heroine killed herself; but the author, saved by this vicarious sacrifice, lived, and in time even smiled over her manuscript.
It was many years since Justine Amherst had recalled this youthful incident; but the memory of it recurred to her as she turned from Mr. Langhope's door. For a moment death seemed the easiest escape from what confronted her; but though she could no longer medicine her despair by turning it into fiction, she knew at once that she must somehow transpose it into terms of action, that she must always escape from life into more life, and not into its negation.
She had been carried into Mr. Langhope's presence by that expiatory passion which still burns so high, and draws its sustenance from so deep down, in the unsleeping hearts of women. Though she had never wavered in her conviction that her act had been justified her ideas staggered under the sudden comprehension of its consequences. Not till that morning had she seen those consequences in their terrible, unsuspected extent, had she understood how one stone rashly loosened from the laboriously erected structure of human society may produce remote fissures in that clumsy fabric. She saw that, having hazarded the loosening of the stone, she should have held herself apart from ordinary human ties, like some priestess set apart for the service of the temple. And instead, she had seized happiness with both hands, taken it as the gift of the very fate she had herself precipitated! She remembered some old Greek saying to the effect that the gods never forgive the mortal who presumes to love and suffer like a god. She had dared to do both, and the gods were bringing ruin on that deeper self which had its life in those about her.
So much had become clear to her when she heard Amherst declare his intention of laying the facts before Mr. Langhope. His few broken words lit up the farthest verge of their lives. She saw that his retrospective reverence for his wife's memory, which was far as possible removed from the strong passion of the mind and senses that bound him to herself, was indelibly stained and desecrated by the discovery that all he had received from the one woman had been won for him by the deliberate act of the other. This was what no reasoning, no appeal to the calmer judgment, could ever, in his inmost thoughts, undo or extenuate. It could find appeasement only in the renunciation of all that had come to him from Bessy; and this renunciation, so different from the mere sacrifice of material well-being, was bound up with consequences so far-reaching, so destructive to the cause which had inspired his whole life, that Justine felt the helpless terror of the mortal who has launched one of the heavenly bolts.
She could think of no way of diverting it but the way she had chosen. She must see Mr. Langhope first, must clear Amherst of the least faint association with her act or her intention. And to do this she must exaggerate, not her own compunction--for she could not depart from the exact truth in reporting her feelings and convictions--but her husband's first instinctive movement of horror, the revulsion of feeling her confession had really produced in him. This was the most painful part of her task, and for this reason her excited imagination clothed it with a special expiatory value. If she could purchase Amherst's peace of mind, and the security of his future, by confessing, and even over-emphasizing, the momentary estrangement between them there would be a bitter joy in such payment!
Her hour with Mr. Langhope proved the correctness of her intuition. She could save Amherst only by effacing herself from his life: those about him would be only too ready to let her bear the full burden of obloquy. She could see that, for a dozen reasons, Mr. Langhope, even in the first shock of his dismay, unconsciously craved a way of exonerating Amherst, of preserving intact the relation on which so much of his comfort had come to depend. And she had the courage to make the most of his desire, to fortify it by isolating Amherst's point of view from hers; so that, when the hour was over, she had the solace of feeling that she had completely freed him from any conceivable consequence of her act.
So far, the impetus of self-sacrifice had carried her straight to her goal; but, as frequently happens with such atoning impulses, it left her stranded just short of any subsequent plan of conduct. Her next step, indeed, was clear enough: she must return to Hanaford, explain to her husband that she had felt impelled to tell her own story to Mr. Langhope, and then take up her ordinary life till chance offered her a pretext for fulfilling her promise. But what pretext was likely to present itself? No symbolic horn would sound the hour of fulfillment; she must be her own judge, and hear the call in the depths of her own conscience.
WHEN Amherst, returning late that afternoon from Westmore, learned of his wife's departure, and read the note she had left, he found it, for a time, impossible to bring order out of the confusion of feeling produced in him.
His mind had been disturbed enough before. All day, through the routine of work at the mills, he had laboured inwardly with the difficulties confronting him; and his unrest had been increased by the fact that his situation bore an ironic likeness to that in which, from a far different cause, he had found himself at the other crisis of his life. Once more he was threatened with the possibility of having to give up Westmore, at a moment when concentration of purpose and persistency of will were at last beginning to declare themselves in tangible results. Before, he had only given up dreams; now it was their fruition that he was asked to surrender. And he was fixed in his resolve to withdraw absolutely from Westmore if the statement he had to make to Mr. Langhope was received with the least hint of an offensive mental reservation. All forms of moral compromise had always been difficult to Amherst, and like many men absorbed in large and complicated questions he craved above all clearness and peace in his household relation. The first months of his second marriage had brought him, as a part of richer and deeper joys, this enveloping sense of a clear moral medium, in which no subterfuge or equivocation could draw breath. He had felt that henceforth he could pour into his work all the combative energy, the powers of endurance, resistance, renovation, which had once been unprofitably dissipated in the vain attempt to bring some sort of harmony into life with Bessy. Between himself and Justine, apart from their love for each other, there was the wider passion for their kind, which gave back to them an enlarged and deepened reflection of their personal feeling. In such an air it had seemed that no petty egotism could hamper their growth, no misintelligence obscure their love; yet all the while this pure happiness had been unfolding against a sordid background of falsehood and intrigue from which his soul turned with loathing.
Justine was right in assuming that Amherst had never thought much about women. He had vaguely regarded them as meant to people that hazy domain of feeling designed to offer the busy man an escape from thought. His second marriage, leading him to the blissful discovery that woman can think as well as feel, that there are beings of the ornamental sex in whom brain and heart have so enlarged each other that their emotions are as clear as thought, their thoughts as warm as emotions--this discovery had had the effect of making him discard his former summary conception of woman as a bundle of inconsequent impulses, and admit her at a stroke to full mental equality with her lord. The result of this act of manumission was, that in judging Justine he could no longer allow for what was purely feminine in her conduct. It was incomprehensible to him that she, to whom truth had seemed the essential element of life, should have been able to draw breath, and find happiness, in an atmosphere of falsehood and dissimulation. His mind could assent--at least in the abstract--to the reasonableness of her act; but he was still unable to understand her having concealed it from him. He could enter far enough into her feelings to allow for her having kept silence on his first return to Lynbrook, when she was still under the strain of a prolonged and terrible trial; but that she should have continued to do so when he and she had discovered and confessed their love for each other, threw an intolerable doubt on her whole course.
He stayed late at the mills, finding one pretext after another for delaying his return to Hanaford, and trying, while he gave one part of his mind to the methodical performance of his task, to adjust the other to some definite view of the future. But all was darkened and confused by the sense that, between himself and Justine, complete communion of thought was no longer possible. It had, in fact, never existed; there had always been a locked chamber in her mind, and he knew not yet what other secrets might inhabit it.
The shock of finding her gone when he reached home gave a new turn to his feelings. She had made no mystery of her destination, leaving word with the servants that she had gone to town to see Mr. Langhope; and Amherst found a note from her on his study table.
I feel, she wrote, "that I ought to see Mr. Langhope myself, and be the first to tell him what must be told. It was like you, dearest, to wish to spare me this, but it would have made me more unhappy; and Mr. Langhope might wish to hear the facts in my own words. I shall come back tomorrow, and after that it will be for you to decide what must be done."
The brevity and simplicity of the note were characteristic; in moments of high tension Justine was always calm and direct. And it was like her, too, not to make any covert appeal to his sympathy, not to seek to entrap his judgment by caressing words and plaintive allusions. The quiet tone in which she stated her purpose matched the firmness and courage of the act, and for a moment Amherst was shaken by a revulsion of feeling. Her heart was level with his, after all--if she had done wrong she would bear the brunt of it alone. It was so exactly what he himself would have felt and done in such a situation that faith in her flowed back through all the dried channels of his heart. But an instant later the current set the other way. The wretched years of his first marriage had left in him a residue of distrust, a tendency to dissociate every act from its ostensible motive. He had been too profoundly the dupe of his own enthusiasm not to retain this streak of scepticism, and it now moved him to ask if Justine's sudden departure had not been prompted by some other cause than the one she avowed. Had that alone actuated her, why not have told it to him, and asked his consent to her plan? Why let him leave the house without a hint of her purpose, and slip off by the first train as soon as he was safe at Westmore? Might it not be that she had special reasons for wishing Mr. Langhope to _hear her own version first_--that there were questions she wished to parry herself, explanations she could trust no one to make for her? The thought plunged Amherst into deeper misery. He knew not how to defend himself against these disintegrating suspicions--he felt only that, once the accord between two minds is broken, it is less easy to restore than the passion between two hearts. He dragged heavily through his solitary evening, and awaited with dread and yet impatience a message announcing his wife's return.
* * * * *
It would have been easier--far easier--when she left Mr. Langhope's door, to go straight out into the darkness and let it close in on her for good.
Justine felt herself yielding to the spell of that suggestion as she walked along the lamplit pavement, hardly conscious of the turn her steps were taking. The door of the house which a few weeks before had been virtually hers had closed on her without a question. She had been suffered to go out into the darkness without being asked whither she was going, or under what roof her night would be spent. The contrast between her past and present sounded through the tumult of her thoughts like the evil laughter of temptation. The house at Hanaford, to which she was returning, would look at her with the same alien face--nowhere on earth, at that moment, was a door which would open to her like the door of home.
In her painful self-absorption she followed the side street toward Madison Avenue, and struck southward down that tranquil thoroughfare. There was a physical relief in rapid motion, and she walked on, still hardly aware of her direction, toward the clustered lights of Madison Square. Should she return to Hanaford, she had still several hours to dispose of before the departure of the midnight train; and if she did not return, hours and dates no longer existed for her.
It would be easier--infinitely easier--not to go back. To take up her life with Amherst would, under any circumstances, be painful enough; to take it up under the tacit restriction of her pledge to Mr. Langhope seemed more than human courage could face. As she approached the square she had almost reached the conclusion that such a temporary renewal was beyond her strength--beyond what any standard of duty exacted. The question of an alternative hardly troubled her. She would simply go on living, and find an escape in work and material hardship. It would not be hard for so inconspicuous a person to slip back into the obscure mass of humanity.
She paused a moment on the edge of the square, vaguely seeking a direction for her feet that might permit the working of her thoughts to go on uninterrupted; and as she stood there, her eyes fell on the bench near the corner of Twenty-sixth Street, where she had sat with Amherst on the day of his flight from Lynbrook. He too had dreamed of escaping from insoluble problems into the clear air of hard work and simple duties; and she remembered the words with which she had turned him back. The cases, of course, were not identical, since he had been flying in anger and wounded pride from a situation for which he was in no wise to blame; yet, if even at such a moment she had insisted on charity and forbearance, how could she now show less self-denial than she had exacted of him?
If you go away for a time, surely it ought to be in such a way that your going does not seem to cast any reflection on Bessy.... That was how she had put it to him, and how, with the mere change of a name, she must now, for reasons as cogent, put it to herself. It was just as much a part of the course she had planned to return to her husband now, and take up their daily life together, as it would, later on, be her duty to drop out of that life, when her doing so could no longer involve him in the penalty to be paid.
She stood a little while looking at the bench on which they had sat, and giving thanks in her heart for the past strength which was now helping to build up her failing courage: such a patchwork business are our best endeavours, yet so faithfully does each weak upward impulse reach back a hand to the next.
* * * * *
Justine's explanation of her visit to Mr. Langhope was not wholly satisfying to her husband. She did not conceal from him that the scene had been painful, but she gave him to understand, as briefly as possible, that Mr. Langhope, after his first movement of uncontrollable distress, had seemed able to make allowances for the pressure under which she had acted, and that he had, at any rate, given no sign of intending to let her confession make any change in the relation between the households. If she did not--as Amherst afterward recalled--put all this specifically into words, she contrived to convey it in her manner, in her allusions, above all in her recovered composure. She had the demeanour of one who has gone through a severe test of strength, but come out of it in complete control of the situation. There was something slightly unnatural in this prompt solution of so complicated a difficulty, and it had the effect of making Amherst ask himself what, to produce such a result, must have been the gist of her communication to Mr. Langhope. If the latter had shown any disposition to be cruel, or even unjust, Amherst's sympathies would have rushed instantly to his wife's defence; but the fact that there was apparently to be no call on them left his reason free to compare and discriminate, with the final result that the more he pondered on his father-in-law's attitude the less intelligible it became.
A few days after Justine's return he was called to New York on business; and before leaving he told her that he should of course take the opportunity of having a talk with Mr. Langhope.
She received the statement with the gentle composure from which she had not departed since her return from town; and he added tentatively, as if to provoke her to a clearer expression of feeling: "I shall not be satisfied, of course, till I see for myself just how he feels--just how much, at bottom, this has affected him--since my own future relation to him will, as I have already told you, depend entirely on his treatment of you."
She met this without any sign of disturbance. "His treatment of me was very kind," she said. "But would it not, on your part," she continued hesitatingly, "be kinder not to touch on the subject so soon again?"
The line deepened between his brows. "Touch on it? I sha'n't rest till I've gone to the bottom of it! Till then, you must understand," he summed up with decision, "I feel myself only on sufferance here at Westmore."
Yes--I understand, she assented; and as he bent over to kiss her for goodbye a tenuous impenetrable barrier seemed to lie between their lips.
* * * * *
It was Justine's turn to await with a passionate anxiety her husband's home-coming; and when, on the third day, he reappeared, her dearly acquired self-control gave way to a tremulous eagerness. This was, after all, the turning-point in their lives: everything depended on how Mr. Langhope had "played up" to his cue; had kept to his side of their bond.
Amherst's face showed signs of emotional havoc: when feeling once broke out in him it had full play, and she could see that his hour with Mr. Langhope had struck to the roots of life. But the resultant expression was one of invigoration, not defeat; and she gathered at a glance that her partner had not betrayed her. She drew a tragic solace from the success of her achievement; yet it flung her into her husband's arms with a passion of longing to which, as she instantly felt, he did not as completely respond.
There was still, then, something "between" them: somewhere the mechanism of her scheme had failed, or its action had not produced the result she had counted on.
As soon as they were alone in the study she said, as quietly as she could: "You saw your father-in-law? You talked with him?"
Yes--I spent the afternoon with him. Cicely sent you her love.
She coloured at the mention of the child's name and murmured: "And Mr. Langhope?"
He is perfectly calm now--perfectly impartial.--This business has made me feel, Amherst added abruptly, "that I have never been quite fair to him. I never thought him a magnanimous man."
He has proved himself so, Justine murmured, her head bent low over a bit of needlework; and Amherst affirmed energetically: "He has been more than that--generous!"
She looked up at him with a smile. "I am so glad, dear; so glad there is not to be the least shadow between you...."
No, Amherst said, his voice flagging slightly. There was a pause, and then he went on with renewed emphasis: "Of course I made my point clear to him."
Your point?
That I stand or fall by his judgment of you.
Oh, if he had but said it more tenderly! But he delivered it with the quiet resolution of a man who contends for an abstract principle of justice, and not for a passion grown into the fibres of his heart!
You are generous too, she faltered, her voice trembling a little.
Amherst frowned; and she perceived that any hint, on her part, of recognizing the slightest change in their relations was still like pressure on a painful bruise.
There is no need for such words between us, he said impatiently; "and Mr. Langhope's attitude," he added, with an effort at a lighter tone, "has made it unnecessary, thank heaven, that we should ever revert to the subject again."
He turned to his desk as he spoke, and plunged into perusal of the letters that had accumulated in his absence.
* * * * *
There was a temporary excess of work at Westmore, and during the days that followed he threw himself into it with a zeal that showed Justine how eagerly he sought any pretext for avoiding confidential moments. The perception was painful enough, yet not as painful as another discovery that awaited her. She too had her tasks at Westmore: the supervision of the hospital, the day nursery, the mothers' club, and the various other organizations whereby she and Amherst were trying to put some sort of social unity into the lives of the mill-hands; and when, on the day after his return from New York, she presented herself, as usual, at the Westmore office, where she was in the habit of holding a brief consultation with him before starting on her rounds, she was at once aware of a new tinge of constraint in his manner. It hurt him, then, to see her at Westmore--hurt him more than to live with her, at Hanaford, under Bessy's roof! For it was there, at the mills, that his real life was led, the life with which Justine had been most identified, the life that had been made possible for both by the magnanimity of that other woman whose presence was now forever between them.
Justine made no sign. She resumed her work as though unconscious of any change; but whereas in the past they had always found pretexts for seeking each other out, to discuss the order of the day's work, or merely to warm their hearts by a rapid word or two, now each went a separate way, sometimes not meeting till they regained the house at night-fall.
And as the weeks passed she began to understand that, by a strange inversion of probability, the relation between Amherst and herself was to be the means of holding her to her compact with Mr. Langhope--if indeed it were not nearer the truth to say that it had made such a compact unnecessary. Amherst had done his best to take up their life together as though there had been no break in it; but slowly the fact was being forced on her that by remaining with him she was subjecting him to intolerable suffering--was coming to be the personification of the very thoughts and associations from which he struggled to escape. Happily her promptness of action had preserved Westmore to him, and in Westmore she believed that he would in time find a refuge from even the memory of what he was now enduring. But meanwhile her presence kept the thought alive; and, had every other incentive lost its power, this would have been enough to sustain her. Fate had, ironically enough, furnished her with an unanswerable reason for leaving Amherst; the impossibility of their keeping up such a relation as now existed between them would soon become too patent to be denied.
Meanwhile, as summer approached, she knew that external conditions would also call upon her to act. The visible signal for her withdrawal would be Cicely's next visit to Westmore. The child's birthday fell in early June; and Amherst, some months previously, had asked that she should be permitted to spend it at Hanaford, and that it should be chosen as the date for the opening of the first model cottages at Hopewood.
It was Justine who had originated the idea of associating Cicely's anniversaries with some significant moment in the annals of the mill colony; and struck by the happy suggestion, he had at once applied himself to hastening on the work at Hopewood. The eagerness of both Amherst and Justine that Cicely should be identified with the developing life of Westmore had been one of the chief influences in reconciling Mr. Langhope to his son-in-law's second marriage. Husband and wife had always made it clear that they regarded themselves as the mere trustees of the Westmore revenues, and that Cicely's name should, as early as possible, be associated with every measure taken for the welfare of the people. But now, as Justine knew, the situation was changed; and Cicely would not be allowed to come to Hanaford until she herself had left it. The manifold threads of divination that she was perpetually throwing out in Amherst's presence told her, without word or sign on his part, that he also awaited Cicely's birthday as a determining date in their lives. He spoke confidently, and as a matter of course, of Mr. Langhope's bringing his grand-daughter at the promised time; but Justine could hear a note of challenge in his voice, as though he felt that Mr. Langhope's sincerity had not yet been put to the test.
As the time drew nearer it became more difficult for her to decide just how she should take the step she had determined on. She had no material anxiety for the future, for although she did not mean to accept a penny from her husband after she had left him, she knew it would be easy for her to take up her nursing again; and she knew also that her hospital connections would enable her to find work in a part of the country far enough distant to remove her entirely from his life. But she had not yet been able to invent a reason for leaving that should be convincing enough to satisfy him, without directing his suspicions to the truth. As she revolved the question she suddenly recalled an exclamation of Amherst's--a word spoken as they entered Mr. Langhope's door, on the fatal afternoon when she had found Wyant's letter awaiting her.
There's nothing you can't make people believe, you little Jesuit!
She had laughed in pure joy at his praise of her; for every bantering phrase had then been a caress. But now the words returned with a sinister meaning. She knew they were true as far as Amherst was concerned: in the arts of casuistry and equivocation a child could have outmatched him, and she had only to exert her will to dupe him as deeply as she pleased. Well! the task was odious, but it was needful: it was the bitterest part of her expiation that she must deceive him once more to save him from the results of her former deception. This decision once reached, every nerve in her became alert for an opportunity to do the thing and have it over; so that, whenever they were alone together, she was in an attitude of perpetual tension, her whole mind drawn up for its final spring.
The decisive word came, one evening toward the end of May, in the form of an allusion on Amherst's part to Cicely's approaching visit. Husband and wife were seated in the drawing-room after dinner, he with a book in hand, she bending, as usual, over the needlework which served at once as a pretext for lowered eyes, and as a means of disguising her fixed preoccupation.
Have you worked out a plan? he asked, laying down his book. "It occurred to me that it would be rather a good idea if we began with a sort of festivity for the kids at the day nursery. You could take Cicely there early, and I could bring out Mr. Langhope after luncheon. The whole performance would probably tire him too much."
Justine listened with suspended thread. "Yes--that seems a good plan."
Will you see about the details, then? You know it's only a week off.
Yes, I know. She hesitated, and then took the spring. "I ought to tell you John--that I--I think I may not be here...."
He raised his head abruptly, and she saw the blood mount under his fair skin. "Not be here?" he exclaimed.
She met his look as steadily as she could. "I think of going away for awhile."
Going away? Where? What is the matter--are you not well?
There was her pretext--he had found it for her! Why should she not simply plead ill-health? Afterward she would find a way of elaborating the details and making them plausible. But suddenly, as she was about to speak, there came to her the feeling which, up to one fatal moment in their lives, had always ruled their intercourse--the feeling that there must be truth, and absolute truth, between them. Absolute, indeed, it could never be again, since he must never know of the condition exacted by Mr. Langhope; but that, at the moment, seemed almost a secondary motive compared to the deeper influences that were inexorably forcing them apart. At any rate, she would trump up no trivial excuse for the step she had resolved on; there should be truth, if not the whole truth, in this last decisive hour between them.
Yes; I am quite well--at least my body is, she said quietly. "But I am tired, perhaps; my mind has been going round too long in the same circle." She paused for a brief space, and then, raising her head, and looking him straight in the eyes: "Has it not been so with you?" she asked.
The question seemed to startle Amherst. He rose from his chair and took a few steps toward the hearth, where a small fire was crumbling into embers. He turned his back to it, resting an arm on the mantel-shelf; then he said, in a somewhat unsteady tone: "I thought we had agreed not to speak of all that again."
Justine shook her head with a fugitive half-smile. "I made no such agreement. And besides, what is the use, when we can always hear each other's thoughts speak, and they speak of nothing else?"
Amherst's brows darkened. "It is not so with mine," he began; but she raised her hand with a silencing gesture.
I know you have tried your best that it should not be so; and perhaps you have succeeded better than I. But I am tired, horribly tired--I want to get away from everything!
She saw a look of pain in his eyes. He continued to lean against the mantel-shelf, his head slightly lowered, his unseeing gaze fixed on a remote scroll in the pattern of the carpet; then he said in a low tone: "I can only repeat again what I have said before--that I understand why you did what you did."
Thank you, she answered, in the same tone.
There was another pause, for she could not trust herself to go on speaking; and presently he asked, with a tinge of bitterness in his voice: "That does not satisfy you?"
She hesitated. "It satisfies me as much as it does you--and no more," she replied at length.
He looked up hastily. "What do you mean?"
Just what I say. We can neither of us go on living on that understanding just at present. She rose as she spoke, and crossed over to the hearth. "I want to go back to my nursing--to go out to Michigan, to a town where I spent a few months the year before I first came to Hanaford. I have friends there, and can get work easily. And you can tell people that I was ill and needed a change."
It had been easier to say than she had imagined, and her voice held its clear note till the end; but when she had ceased, the whole room began to reverberate with her words, and through the clashing they made in her brain she felt a sudden uncontrollable longing that they should provoke in him a cry of protest, of resistance. Oh, if he refused to let her go--if he caught her to him, and defied the world to part them--what then of her pledge to Mr. Langhope, what then of her resolve to pay the penalty alone?
But in the space of a heart-beat she knew that peril--that longed-for peril!--was past. Her husband had remained silent--he neither moved toward her nor looked at her; and she felt in every slackening nerve that in the end he would let her go.
MR. LANGHOPE, tossing down a note on Mrs. Ansell's drawing-room table, commanded imperiously: "Read that!"
She set aside her tea-cup, and looked up, not at the note, but into his face, which was crossed by one of the waves of heat and tremulousness that she was beginning to fear for him. Mr. Langhope had changed greatly in the last three months; and as he stood there in the clear light of the June afternoon it came to her that he had at last suffered the sudden collapse which is the penalty of youth preserved beyond its time.
What is it? she asked, still watching him as she put out her hand for the letter.
Amherst writes to remind me of my promise to take Cicely to Hanaford next week, for her birthday.
Well--it was a promise, wasn't it? she rejoined, running her eyes over the page.
A promise--yes; but made before.... Read the note--you'll see there's no reference to his wife. For all I know, she'll be there to receive us.
But that was a promise too.
That neither Cicely nor I should ever set eyes on her? Yes. But why should she keep it? I was a fool that day--she fooled me as she's fooled us all! But you saw through it from the beginning--you said at once that she'd never leave him.
Mrs. Ansell reflected. "I said that before I knew all the circumstances. Now I think differently."
You think she still means to go?
She handed the letter back to him. "I think this is to tell you so."
This? He groped for his glasses, dubiously scanning the letter again.
Yes. And what's more, if you refuse to go she'll have every right to break her side of the agreement.
Mr. Langhope sank into a chair, steadying himself painfully with his stick. "Upon my soul, I sometimes think you're on her side!" he ejaculated.
No--but I like fair play, she returned, measuring his tea carefully into his favourite little porcelain tea-pot.
Fair play?
She's offering to do her part. It's for you to do yours now--to take Cicely to Hanaford.
If I find her there, I never cross Amherst's threshold again!
Mrs. Ansell, without answering, rose and put his tea-cup on the slender-legged table at his elbow; then, before returning to her seat, she found the enamelled match-box and laid it by the cup. It was becoming difficult for Mr. Langhope to guide his movements about her small encumbered room; and he had always liked being waited on.
* * * * *
Mrs. Ansell's prognostication proved correct. When Mr. Langhope and Cicely arrived at Hanaford they found Amherst alone to receive them. He explained briefly that his wife had been unwell, and had gone to seek rest and change at the house of an old friend in the west. Mr. Langhope expressed a decent amount of regret, and the subject was dropped as if by common consent. Cicely, however, was not so easily silenced. Poor Bessy's uncertain fits of tenderness had produced more bewilderment than pleasure in her sober-minded child; but the little girl's feelings and perceptions had developed rapidly in the equable atmosphere of her step-mother's affection. Cicely had reached the age when children put their questions with as much ingenuity as persistence, and both Mr. Langhope and Amherst longed for Mrs. Ansell's aid in parrying her incessant interrogations as to the cause and length of Justine's absence, what she had said before going, and what promise she had made about coming back. But Mrs. Ansell had not come to Hanaford. Though it had become a matter of habit to include her in the family pilgrimages to the mills she had firmly maintained the plea of more urgent engagements; and the two men, with only Cicely between them, had spent the long days and longer evenings in unaccustomed and unmitigated propinquity.
Mr. Langhope, before leaving, thought it proper to touch tentatively on his promise of giving Cicely to Amherst for the summer; but to his surprise the latter, after a moment of hesitation, replied that he should probably go to Europe for two or three months.
To Europe? Alone? escaped from Mr. Langhope before he had time to weigh his words.
Amherst frowned slightly. "I have been made a delegate to the Berne conference on the housing of factory operatives," he said at length, without making a direct reply to the question; "and if there is nothing to keep me at Westmore, I shall probably go out in July." He waited a moment, and then added: "My wife has decided to spend the summer in Michigan."
Mr. Langhope's answer was a vague murmur of assent, and Amherst turned the talk to other matters.
* * * * *
Mr. Langhope returned to town with distinct views on the situation at Hanaford.
Poor devil--I'm sorry for him: he can hardly speak of her, he broke out at once to Mrs. Ansell, in the course of their first confidential hour together.
Because he cares too much--he's too unhappy?
Because he loathes her! Mr. Langhope brought out with emphasis.
Mrs. Ansell drew a deep sigh which made him add accusingly: "I believe you're actually sorry!"
Sorry? She raised her eye-brows with a slight smile. "Should one not always be sorry to know there's a little less love and a little more hate in the world?"
You'll be asking _me_ not to hate her next!
She still continued to smile on him. "It's the haters, not the hated, I'm sorry for," she said at length; and he flung back impatiently: "Oh, don't let's talk of her. I sometimes feel she takes up more place in our lives than when she was with us!"
* * * * *
Amherst went to the Berne conference in July, and spent six weeks afterward in rapid visits to various industrial centres and model factory villages. During his previous European pilgrimages his interest had by no means been restricted to sociological questions: the appeal of an old civilization, reaching him through its innumerable forms of tradition and beauty, had roused that side of his imagination which his work at home left untouched. But upon his present state of deep moral commotion the spells of art and history were powerless to work. The foundations of his life had been shaken, and the fair exterior of the world was as vacant as a maniac's face. He could only take refuge in his special task, barricading himself against every expression of beauty and poetry as so many poignant reminders of a phase of life that he was vainly trying to cast off and forget.
Even his work had been embittered to him, thrust out of its place in the ordered scheme of things. It had cost him a hard struggle to hold fast to his main purpose, to convince himself that his real duty lay, not in renouncing the Westmore money and its obligations, but in carrying out his projected task as if nothing had occurred to affect his personal relation to it. The mere fact that such a renunciation would have been a deliberate moral suicide, a severing once for all of every artery of action, made it take on, at first, the semblance of an obligation, a sort of higher duty to the abstract conception of what he owed himself. But Justine had not erred in her forecast. Once she had passed out of his life, it was easier for him to return to a dispassionate view of his situation, to see, and boldly confess to himself that he saw, the still higher duty of sticking to his task, instead of sacrificing it to any ideal of personal disinterestedness. It was this gradual process of adjustment that saved him from the desolating scepticism which falls on the active man when the sources of his activity are tainted. Having accepted his fate, having consented to see in himself merely the necessary agent of a good to be done, he could escape from self-questioning only by shutting himself up in the practical exigencies of his work, closing his eyes and his thoughts to everything which had formerly related it to a wider world, had given meaning and beauty to life as a whole.
The return from Europe, and the taking up of the daily routine at Hanaford, were the most difficult phases in this process of moral adaptation.
Justine's departure had at first brought relief. He had been too sincere with himself to oppose her wish to leave Hanaford for a time, since he believed that, for her as well as for himself, a temporary separation would be less painful than a continuance of their actual relation. But as the weeks passed into months he found he was no nearer to a clear view of his own case: the future was still dark and enigmatic. Justine's desire to leave him had revived his unformulated distrust of her. What could it mean but that there were thoughts within her which could not be at rest in his presence? He had given her every proof of his wish to forget the past, and Mr. Langhope had behaved with unequalled magnanimity. Yet Justine's unhappiness was evident: she could not conceal her longing to escape from the conditions her act had created. Was it because, in reality, she was conscious of other motives than the one she acknowledged? She had insisted, almost unfeelingly as it might have seemed, on the abstract rightness of what she had done, on the fact that, ideally speaking, her act could not be made less right, less justifiable, by the special accidental consequences that had flowed from it. Because these consequences had caught her in a web of tragic fatality she would not be guilty of the weakness of tracing back the disaster to any intrinsic error in her original motive. Why, then, if this was her real, her proud attitude toward the past--and since those about her believed in her sincerity, and accepted her justification as valid from her point of view if not from theirs--why had she not been able to maintain her posture, to carry on life on the terms she had exacted from others?
A special circumstance contributed to this feeling of distrust; the fact, namely, that Justine, a week after her departure from Hanaford, had written to say that she could not, from that moment till her return, consent to accept any money from Amherst. As her manner was, she put her reasons clearly and soberly, without evasion or ambiguity.
Since you and I, she wrote, "have always agreed in regarding the Westmore money as a kind of wage for our services at the mills, I cannot be satisfied to go on drawing that wage while I am unable to do any work in return. I am sure you must feel as I do about this; and you need have no anxiety as to the practical side of the question, since I have enough to live on in some savings from my hospital days, which were invested for me two years ago by Harry Dressel, and are beginning to bring in a small return. This being the case, I feel I can afford to interpret in any way I choose the terms of the bargain between myself and Westmore."
On reading this, Amherst's mind had gone through the strange dual process which now marked all his judgments of his wife. At first he had fancied he understood her, and had felt that he should have done as she did; then the usual reaction of distrust set in, and he asked himself why she, who had so little of the conventional attitude toward money, should now develop this unexpected susceptibility. And so the old question presented itself in another shape: if she had nothing to reproach herself for, why was it intolerable to her to live on Bessy's money? The fact that she was doing no actual service at Westmore did not account for her scruples--she would have been the last person to think that a sick servant should be docked of his pay. Her reluctance could come only from that hidden cause of compunction which had prompted her departure, and which now forced her to sever even the merely material links between herself and her past.
Amherst, on his return to Hanaford, had tried to find in these considerations a reason for his deep unrest. It was his wife's course which still cast a torturing doubt on what he had braced his will to accept and put behind him. And he now told himself that the perpetual galling sense of her absence was due to this uneasy consciousness of what it meant, of the dark secrets it enveloped and held back from him. In actual truth, every particle of his being missed her, he lacked her at every turn. She had been at once the partner of his task, and the _pays bleu_ into which he escaped from it; the vivifying thought which gave meaning to the life he had chosen, yet never let him forget that there was a larger richer life outside, to which he was rooted by deeper and more intrinsic things than any abstract ideal of altruism. His love had preserved his identity, saved him from shrinking into the mere nameless unit which the social enthusiast is in danger of becoming unless the humanitarian passion is balanced, and a little overweighed, by a merely human one. And now this equilibrium was lost forever, and his deepest pain lay in realizing that he could not regain it, even by casting off Westmore and choosing the narrower but richer individual existence that her love might once have offered. His life was in truth one indivisible organism, not two halves artificially united. Self and other-self were ingrown from the roots--whichever portion fate restricted him to would be but a mutilated half-live fragment of the whole.
Happily for him, chance made this crisis of his life coincide with a strike at Westmore. Soon after his return to Hanaford he found himself compelled to grapple with the hardest problem of his industrial career, and he was carried through the ensuing three months on that tide of swift obligatory action that sweeps the ship-wrecked spirit over so many sunken reefs of fear and despair. The knowledge that he was better able to deal with the question than any one who might conceivably have taken his place--this conviction, which was presently confirmed by the peaceable adjustment of the strike, helped to make the sense of his immediate usefulness outbalance that other, disintegrating doubt as to the final value of such efforts. And so he tried to settle down into a kind of mechanical altruism, in which the reflexes of habit should take the place of that daily renewal of faith and enthusiasm which had been fed from the springs of his own joy.
* * * * *
The autumn came and passed into winter; and after Mr. Langhope's re-establishment in town Amherst began to resume his usual visits to his step-daughter.
His natural affection for the little girl had been deepened by the unforeseen manner in which her fate had been entrusted to him. The thought of Bessy, softened to compunction by the discovery that her love had persisted under their apparently hopeless estrangement--this feeling, intensified to the verge of morbidness by the circumstances attending her death, now sought expression in a passionate devotion to her child. Accident had, in short, created between Bessy and himself a retrospective sympathy which the resumption of life together would have dispelled in a week--one of the exhalations from the past that depress the vitality of those who linger too near the grave of dead experiences.
Since Justine's departure Amherst had felt himself still more drawn to Cicely; but his relation to the child was complicated by the fact that she would not be satisfied as to the cause of her step-mother's absence. Whenever Amherst came to town, her first question was for Justine; and her memory had the precocious persistence sometimes developed in children too early deprived of their natural atmosphere of affection. Cicely had always been petted and adored, at odd times and by divers people; but some instinct seemed to tell her that, of all the tenderness bestowed on her, Justine's most resembled the all-pervading motherly element in which the child's heart expands without ever being conscious of its needs.
If it had been embarrassing to evade Cicely's questions in June it became doubly so as the months passed, and the pretext of Justine's ill-health grew more and more difficult to sustain. And in the following March Amherst was suddenly called from Hanaford by the news that the little girl herself was ill. Serious complications had developed from a protracted case of scarlet fever, and for two weeks the child's fate was uncertain. Then she began to recover, and in the joy of seeing life come back to her, Mr. Langhope and Amherst felt as though they must not only gratify every wish she expressed, but try to guess at those they saw floating below the surface of her clear vague eyes.
It was noticeable to Mrs. Ansell, if not to the others, that one of these unexpressed wishes was the desire to see her stepmother. Cicely no longer asked for Justine; but something in her silence, or in the gesture with which she gently put from her other offers of diversion and companionship, suddenly struck Mrs. Ansell as more poignant than speech.
What is it the child wants? she asked the governess, in the course of one of their whispered consultations; and the governess, after a moment's hesitation, replied: "She said something about a letter she wrote to Mrs. Amherst just before she was taken ill--about having had no answer, I think."
Ah--she writes to Mrs. Amherst, does she?
The governess, evidently aware that she trod on delicate ground, tried at once to defend herself and her pupil.
It was my fault, perhaps. I suggested once that her little compositions should take the form of letters--it usually interests a child more--and she asked if they might be written to Mrs. Amherst.
Your fault? Why should not the child write to her step-mother? Mrs. Ansell rejoined with studied surprise; and on the other's murmuring: "Of course--of course----" she added haughtily: "I trust the letters were sent?"
The governess floundered. "I couldn't say--but perhaps the nurse...."
* * * * *
That evening Cicely was less well. There was a slight return of fever, and the doctor, hastily summoned, hinted at the possibility of too much excitement in the sick-room.
Excitement? There has been no excitement, Mr. Langhope protested, quivering with the sudden renewal of fear.
No? The child seemed nervous, uneasy. It's hard to say why, because she is unusually reserved for her age.
The medical man took his departure, and Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell faced each other in the disarray produced by a call to arms when all has seemed at peace.
I shall lose her--I shall lose her! the grandfather broke out, sinking into his chair with a groan.
Mrs. Ansell, gathering up her furs for departure, turned on him abruptly from the threshold.
It's stupid, what you're doing--stupid! she exclaimed with unwonted vehemence.
He raised his head with a startled look. "What do you mean--what I'm doing?"
The child misses Justine. You ought to send for her.
Mr. Langhope's hands dropped to the arms of his chair, and he straightened himself up with a pale flash of indignation. "You've had moments lately----!"
I've had moments, yes; and so have you--when the child came back to us, and we stood there and wondered how we could keep her, tie her fast...and in those moments I saw...saw what she wanted...and so did you!
Mr. Langhope turned away his head. "You're a sentimentalist!" he flung scornfully back.
Oh, call me any bad names you please!
I won't send for that woman!
No. She fastened her furs slowly, with the gentle deliberate movements that no emotion ever hastened or disturbed.
Why do you say no? he challenged her.
To make you contradict me, perhaps, she ventured, after looking at him again.
Ah---- He shifted his position, one elbow supporting his bowed head, his eyes fixed on the ground. Presently he brought out: "Could one ask her to come--and see the child--and go away again--for good?"
To break the compact at your pleasure, and enter into it again for the same reason?
No--no--I see. He paused, and then looked up at her suddenly. "But what if Amherst won't have her back himself?"
Shall I ask him?
I tell you he can't bear to hear her name!
But he doesn't know why she has left him.
Mr. Langhope gathered his brows in a frown. "Why--what on earth--what possible difference would that make?"
Mrs. Ansell, from the doorway, shed a pitying glance on him. "Ah--if you don't see!" she murmured.
He sank back into his seat with a groan. "Good heavens, Maria, how you torture me! I see enough as it is--I see too much of the cursed business!"
She paused again, and then slowly moved a step or two nearer, laying her hand on his shoulder.
There's one thing you've never seen yet, Henry: what Bessy herself would do now--for the child--if she could.
He sat motionless under her light touch, his eyes on hers, till their inmost thoughts felt for and found each other, as they still sometimes could, through the fog of years and selfishness and worldly habit; then he dropped his face into his hands, hiding it from her with the instinctive shrinking of an aged grief.
AMHERST, Cicely's convalescence once assured, had been obliged to go back to Hanaford; but some ten days later, on hearing from Mrs. Ansell that the little girl's progress was less rapid than had been hoped, he returned to his father-in-law's for a Sunday.
He came two days after the talk recorded in the last chapter--a talk of which Mrs. Ansell's letter to him had been the direct result. She had promised Mr. Langhope that, in writing to Amherst, she would not go beyond the briefest statement of fact; and she had kept her word, trusting to circumstances to speak for her.
Mrs. Ansell, during Cicely's illness, had formed the habit of dropping in on Mr. Langhope at the tea hour instead of awaiting him in her own drawing-room; and on the Sunday in question she found him alone. Beneath his pleasure in seeing her, which had grown more marked as his dependence on her increased, she at once discerned traces of recent disturbance; and her first question was for Cicely.
He met it with a discouraged gesture. "No great change--Amherst finds her less well than when he was here before."
He's upstairs with her?
Yes--she seems to want him.
Mrs. Ansell seated herself in silence behind the tea-tray, of which she was now recognized as the officiating priestess. As she drew off her long gloves, and mechanically straightened the row of delicate old cups, Mr. Langhope added with an effort: "I've spoken to him--told him what you said."
She looked up quickly.
About the child's wish, he continued. "About her having written to his wife. It seems her last letters have not been answered."
He paused, and Mrs. Ansell, with her usual calm precision, proceeded to measure the tea into the fluted Georgian tea-pot. She could be as reticent in approval as in reprehension, and not for the world would she have seemed to claim any share in the turn that events appeared to be taking. She even preferred the risk of leaving her old friend to add half-reproachfully: "I told Amherst what you and the nurse thought."
Yes?
That Cicely pines for his wife. I put it to him in black and white. The words came out on a deep strained breath, and Mrs. Ansell faltered: "Well?"
Well--he doesn't know where she is himself.
Doesn't _know_?
They're separated--utterly separated. It's as I told you: he could hardly name her.
Mrs. Ansell had unconsciously ceased her ministrations, letting her hands fall on her knee while she brooded in blank wonder on her companion's face.
I wonder what reason she could have given him? she murmured at length.
For going? He loathes her, I tell you!
Yes--but _how did she make him_?
He struck his hand violently on the arm of his chair. "Upon my soul, you seem to forget!"
No. She shook her head with a half smile. "I simply remember more than you do."
What more? he began with a flush of anger; but she raised a quieting hand.
What does all that matter--if, now that we need her, we can't get her?
He made no answer, and she returned to the dispensing of his tea; but as she rose to put the cup in his hand he asked, half querulously: "You think it's going to be very bad for the child, then?"
Mrs. Ansell smiled with the thin edge of her lips. "One can hardly set the police after her----!"
No; we're powerless, he groaned in assent.
As the cup passed between them she dropped her eyes to his with a quick flash of interrogation; but he sat staring moodily before him, and she moved back to the sofa without a word.
* * * * *
On the way downstairs she met Amherst descending from Cicely's room.
Since the early days of his first marriage there had always been, on Amherst's side, a sense of obscure antagonism toward Mrs. Ansell. She was almost the embodied spirit of the world he dreaded and disliked: her serenity, her tolerance, her adaptability, seemed to smile away and disintegrate all the high enthusiasms, the stubborn convictions, that he had tried to plant in the shifting sands of his married life. And now that Bessy's death had given her back the attributes with which his fancy had originally invested her, he had come to regard Mrs. Ansell as embodying the evil influences that had come between himself and his wife.
Mrs. Ansell was probably not unaware of the successive transitions of feeling which had led up to this unflattering view; but her life had been passed among petty rivalries and animosities, and she had the patience and adroitness of the spy in a hostile camp.
She and Amherst exchanged a few words about Cicely; then she exclaimed, with a glance through the panes of the hall door: "But I must be off--I'm on foot, and the crossings appal me after dark."
He could do no less, at that, than offer to guide her across the perils of Fifth Avenue; and still talking of Cicely, she led him down the thronged thoroughfare till her own corner was reached, and then her own door; turning there to ask, as if by an afterthought: "Won't you come up? There's one thing more I want to say."
A shade of reluctance crossed his face, which, as the vestibule light fell on it, looked hard and tired, like a face set obstinately against a winter gale; but he murmured a word of assent, and followed her into the shining steel cage of the lift.
In her little drawing-room, among the shaded lamps and bowls of spring flowers, she pushed a chair forward, settled herself in her usual corner of the sofa, and said with a directness that seemed an echo of his own tone: "I asked you to come up because I want to talk to you about Mr. Langhope."
Amherst looked at her in surprise. Though his father-in-law's health had been more or less unsatisfactory for the last year, all their concern, of late, had been for Cicely.
You think him less well? he enquired.
She waited to draw off and smooth her gloves, with one of the deliberate gestures that served to shade and supplement her speech.
I think him extremely unhappy.
Amherst moved uneasily in his seat. He did not know where she meant the talk to lead them, but he guessed that it would be over painful places, and he saw no reason why he should be forced to follow her.
You mean that he's still anxious about Cicely?
Partly that--yes. She paused. "The child will get well, no doubt; but she is very lonely. She needs youth, heat, light. Mr. Langhope can't give her those, or even a semblance of them; and it's an art I've lost the secret of," she added with her shadowy smile.
Amherst's brows darkened. "I realize all she has lost----"
Mrs. Ansell glanced up at him quickly. "She is twice motherless," she said.
The blood rose to his neck and temples, and he tightened his hand on the arm of his chair. But it was a part of Mrs. Ansell's expertness to know when such danger signals must be heeded and when they might be ignored, and she went on quietly: "It's the question of the future that is troubling Mr. Langhope. After such an illness, the next months of Cicely's life should be all happiness. And money won't buy the kind she needs: one can't pick out the right companion for such a child as one can match a ribbon. What she wants is spontaneous affection, not the most superlative manufactured article. She wants the sort of love that Justine gave her."
It was the first time in months that Amherst had heard his wife's name spoken outside of his own house. No one but his mother mentioned Justine to him now; and of late even his mother had dropped her enquiries and allusions, prudently acquiescing in the habit of silence which his own silence had created about him. To hear the name again--the two little syllables which had been the key of life to him, and now shook him as the turning of a rusted lock shakes a long-closed door--to hear her name spoken familiarly, affectionately, as one speaks of some one who may come into the room the next moment--gave him a shock that was half pain, and half furtive unacknowledged joy. Men whose conscious thoughts are mostly projected outward, on the world of external activities, may be more moved by such a touch on the feelings than those who are perpetually testing and tuning their emotional chords. Amherst had foreseen from the first that Mrs. Ansell might mean to speak of his wife; but though he had intended, if she did so, to cut their talk short, he now felt himself irresistibly constrained to hear her out.
Mrs. Ansell, having sped her shaft, followed its flight through lowered lashes, and saw that it had struck a vulnerable point; but she was far from assuming that the day was won.
I believe, she continued, "that Mr. Langhope has said something of this to you already, and my only excuse for speaking is that I understood he had not been successful in his appeal."
No one but Mrs. Ansell--and perhaps she knew it--could have pushed so far beyond the conventional limits of discretion without seeming to overstep them by a hair; and she had often said, when pressed for the secret of her art, that it consisted simply in knowing the pass-word. That word once spoken, she might have added, the next secret was to give the enemy no time for resistance; and though she saw the frown reappear between Amherst's eyes, she went on, without heeding it: "I entreat you, Mr. Amherst, to let Cicely see your wife."
He reddened again, and pushed back his chair, as if to rise.
No--don't break off like that! Let me say a word more. I know your answer to Mr. Langhope--that you and Justine are no longer together. But I thought of you as a man to sink your personal relations at such a moment as this.
To sink them? he repeated vaguely: and she went on: "After all, what difference does it make?"
What difference? He stared in unmitigated wonder, and then answered, with a touch of irony: "It might at least make the difference of my being unwilling to ask a favour of her."
Mrs. Ansell, at this, raised her eyes and let them rest full on his. "Because she has done you so great a one already?"
He stared again, sinking back automatically into his chair. "I don't understand you."
No. She smiled a little, as if to give herself time. "But I mean that you shall. If I were a man I suppose I couldn't, because a man's code of honour is such a clumsy cast-iron thing. But a woman's, luckily, can be cut over--if she's clever--to fit any new occasion; and in this case I should be willing to reduce mine to tatters if necessary."
Amherst's look of bewilderment deepened. "What is it that I don't understand?" he asked at length, in a low voice.
Well--first of all, why Mr. Langhope had the right to ask you to send for your wife.
The right?
You don't recognize such a right on his part?
No--why should I?
Supposing she had left you by his wish?
His wish? _His----?_
He was on his feet now, gazing at her blindly, while the solid world seemed to grow thin about him. Her next words reduced it to a mist.
My poor Amherst--why else, on earth, should she have left you?
She brought it out clearly, in her small chiming tones; and as the sound travelled toward him it seemed to gather momentum, till her words rang through his brain as if every incomprehensible incident in the past had suddenly boomed forth the question. Why else, indeed, should she have left him? He stood motionless for a while; then he approached Mrs. Ansell and said: "Tell me."
She drew farther back into her corner of the sofa, waving him to a seat beside her, as though to bring his inquisitory eyes on a level where her own could command them; but he stood where he was, unconscious of her gesture, and merely repeating: "Tell me."
She may have said to herself that a woman would have needed no farther telling; but to him she only replied, slanting her head up to his: "To spare you and himself pain--to keep everything, between himself and you, as it had been before you married her."
He dropped down beside her at that, grasping the back of the sofa as if he wanted something to clutch and throttle. The veins swelled in his temples, and as he pushed back his tossed hair Mrs. Ansell noticed for the first time how gray it had grown on the under side.
And he asked this of my wife--he accepted it?'
Haven't _you_ accepted it?
I? How could I guess her reasons--how could I imagine----?
Mrs. Ansell raised her brows a hair's breadth at that. "I don't know. But as a fact, he didn't ask--it was she who offered, who forced it on him, even!"
Forced her going on him?
In a sense, yes; by making it appear that _you_ felt as he did about--about poor Bessy's death: that the thought of what had happened at that time was as abhorrent to you as to him--that _she_ was as abhorrent to you. No doubt she foresaw that, had she permitted the least doubt on that point, there would have been no need of her leaving you, since the relation between yourself and Mr. Langhope would have been altered--destroyed....
Yes. I expected that--I warned her of it. But how did she make him think----?
How can I tell? To begin with, I don't know your real feeling. For all I know she was telling the truth--and Mr. Langhope of course thought she was.
That I abhorred her? Oh---- he broke out, on his feet in an instant.
Then why----?
Why did I let her leave me? He strode across the room, as his habit was in moments of agitation, turning back to her again before he answered. "Because I _didn't_ know--didn't know anything! And because her insisting on going away like that, without any explanation, made me feel...imagine there was...something she didn't _want_ me to know...something she was afraid of not being able to hide from me if we stayed together any longer."
Well--there was: the extent to which she loved you.
Mrs. Ansell; her hands clasped on her knee, her gaze holding his with a kind of visionary fixity, seemed to reconstruct the history of his past, bit by bit, with the words she was dragging out of him.
I see it--I see it all now, she went on, with a repressed fervour that he had never divined in her. "It was the only solution for her, as well as for the rest of you. The more she showed her love, the more it would have cast a doubt on her motive...the greater distance she would have put between herself and you. And so she showed it in the only way that was safe for both of you, by taking herself away and hiding it in her heart; and before going, she secured your peace of mind, your future. If she ruined anything, she rebuilt the ruin. Oh, she paid--she paid in full!"
Justine had paid, yes--paid to the utmost limit of whatever debt toward society she had contracted by overstepping its laws. And her resolve to discharge the debt had been taken in a flash, as soon as she had seen that man can commit no act alone, whether for good or evil. The extent to which Amherst's fate was involved in hers had become clear to her with his first word of reassurance, of faith in her motive. And instantly a plan for releasing him had leapt full-formed into her mind, and had been carried out with swift unflinching resolution. As he forced himself, now, to look down the suddenly illuminated past to the weeks which had elapsed between her visit to Mr. Langhope and her departure from Hanaford, he wondered not so much at her swiftness of resolve as at her firmness in carrying out her plan--and he saw, with a blinding flash of insight, that it was in her love for him that she had found her strength.
In all moments of strong mental tension he became totally unconscious of time and place, and he now remained silent so long, his hands clasped behind him, his eyes fixed on an indeterminate point in space, that Mrs. Ansell at length rose and laid a questioning touch on his arm.
It's not true that you don't know where she is? His face contracted. "At this moment I don't. Lately she has preferred...not to write...."
But surely you must know how to find her?
He tossed back his hair with an energetic movement. "I should find her if I didn't know how!"
They stood confronted in a gaze of silent intensity, each penetrating farther into the mind of the other than would once have seemed possible to either one; then Amherst held out his hand abruptly. "Good-bye--and thank you," he said.
She detained him a moment. "We shall see you soon again--see you both?"
His face grew stern. "It's not to oblige Mr. Langhope that I am going to find my wife."
Ah, now you are unjust to him! she exclaimed.
Don't let us speak of him! he broke in.
Why not? When it is from him the request comes--the entreaty--that everything in the past should be forgotten?
Yes--when it suits his convenience!
Do you imagine that--even judging him in that way--it has not cost him a struggle?
I can only think of what it has cost her!
Mrs. Ansell drew a deep sighing breath. "Ah--but don't you see that she has gained her point, and that nothing else matters to her?"
Gained her point? Not if, by that, you mean that things here can ever go back to the old state--that she and I can remain at Westmore after this!
Mrs. Ansell dropped her eyes for a moment; then she lifted to his her sweet impenetrable face.
Do you know what you have to do--both you and he? Exactly what she decides, she affirmed.
JUSTINE'S answer to her husband's letter bore a New York address; and the surprise of finding her in the same town with himself, and not half an hour's walk from the room in which he sat, was so great that it seemed to demand some sudden and violent outlet of physical movement.
He thrust the letter in his pocket, took up his hat, and leaving the house, strode up Fifth Avenue toward the Park in the early spring sunlight.
The news had taken five days to reach him, for in order to reestablish communication with his wife he had been obliged to write to Michigan, with the request that his letter should be forwarded. He had never supposed that Justine would be hard to find, or that she had purposely enveloped her movements in mystery. When she ceased to write he had simply concluded that, like himself, she felt the mockery of trying to keep up a sort of distant, semi-fraternal relation, marked by the occasional interchange of inexpressive letters. The inextricable mingling of thought and sensation which made the peculiar closeness of their union could never, to such direct and passionate natures, be replaced by the pretense of a temperate friendship. Feeling thus himself, and instinctively assuming the same feeling in his wife, Amherst had respected her silence, her wish to break definitely with their former life. She had written him, in the autumn, that she intended to leave Michigan for a few months, but that, in any emergency, a letter addressed to her friend's house would reach her; and he had taken this as meaning that, unless the emergency arose, she preferred that their correspondence should cease. Acquiescence was all the easier because it accorded with his own desire. It seemed to him, as he looked back, that the love he and Justine had felt for each other was like some rare organism which could maintain life only in its special element; and that element was neither passion nor sentiment, but truth. It was only on the heights that they could breathe.
Some men, in his place, even while accepting the inevitableness of the moral rupture, would have felt concerned for the material side of the case. But it was characteristic of Amherst that this did not trouble him. He took it for granted that his wife would return to her nursing. From the first he had felt certain that it would be intolerable to her to accept aid from him, and that she would choose rather to support herself by the exercise of her regular profession; and, aside from such motives, he, who had always turned to hard work as the rarest refuge from personal misery, thought it natural that she should seek the same means of escape.
He had therefore not been surprised, on opening her letter that morning, to learn that she had taken up her hospital work; but in the amazement of finding her so near he hardly grasped her explanation of the coincidence. There was something about a Buffalo patient suddenly ordered to New York for special treatment, and refusing to go in with a new nurse--but these details made no impression on his mind, which had only room for the fact that chance had brought his wife back at the very moment when his whole being yearned for her.
She wrote that, owing to her duties, she would be unable to see him till three that afternoon; and he had still six hours to consume before their meeting. But in spirit they had met already--they were one in an intensity of communion which, as he strode northward along the bright crowded thoroughfare, seemed to gather up the whole world into one throbbing point of life.
He had a boyish wish to keep the secret of his happiness to himself, not to let Mr. Langhope or Mrs. Ansell know of his meeting with Justine till it was over; and after twice measuring the length of the Park he turned in at one of the little wooden restaurants which were beginning to unshutter themselves in anticipation of spring custom. If only he could have seen Justine that morning! If he could have brought her there, and they could have sat opposite each other, in the bare empty room, with sparrows bustling and twittering in the lilacs against the open window! The room was ugly enough--but how she would have delighted in the delicate green of the near slopes, and the purplish haze of the woods beyond! She took a childish pleasure in such small adventures, and had the knack of giving a touch of magic to their most commonplace details. Amherst, as he finished his cold beef and indifferent eggs, found himself boyishly planning to bring her back there the next day....
Then, over the coffee, he re-read her letter.
The address she gave was that of a small private hospital, and she explained that she would have to receive him in the public parlour, which at that hour was open to other visitors. As the time approached, the thought that they might not be alone when they met became insufferable; and he determined, if he found any one else, in possession of the parlour, to wait in the hall, and meet her as she came down the stairs.
He continued to elaborate this plan as he walked back slowly through the Park, He had timed himself to reach the hospital a little before three; but though it lacked five minutes to the hour when he entered the parlour, two women were already seated in one of its windows. They looked around as he came in, evidently as much annoyed by his appearance as he had been to find them there. The older of the two showed a sallow middle-aged face beneath her limp crape veil; the other was a slight tawdry creature, with nodding feathers, and innumerable chains and bracelets which she fingered ceaselessly as she talked.
They eyed Amherst with resentment, and then turned away, continuing their talk in low murmurs, while he seated himself at the marble-topped table littered with torn magazines. Now and then the younger woman's voice rose in a shrill staccato, and a phrase or two floated over to him. "She'd simply worked herself to death--the nurse told me so.... She expects to go home in another week, though how she's going to stand the _fatigue_----" and then, after an inaudible answer: "It's all _his_ fault, and if I was her I wouldn't go back to him for anything!"
Oh, Cora, he's real sorry now, the older woman protestingly murmured; but the other, unappeased, rejoined with ominously nodding plumes: "_You_ see--if they do make it up, it'll never be the same between them!"
Amherst started up nervously, and as he did so the clock struck three, and he opened the door and passed out into the hall. It was paved with black and white marble; the walls were washed in a dull yellowish tint, and the prevalent odour of antiseptics was mingled with a stale smell of cooking. At the back rose a straight staircase carpeted with brass-bound India-rubber, like a ship's companion-way; and down that staircase she would come in a moment--he fancied he heard her step now....
But the step was that of an elderly black-gowned woman in a cap--the matron probably.
She glanced at Amherst in surprise, and asked: "Are you waiting for some one?"
He made a motion of assent, and she opened the parlour door, saying: "Please walk in."
May I not wait out here? he urged.
She looked at him more attentively. "Why, no, I'm afraid not. You'll find the papers and magazines in here."
Mildly but firmly she drove him in before her, and closing the door, advanced to the two women in the window. Amherst's hopes leapt up: perhaps she had come to fetch the visitors upstairs! He strained his ears to catch what was being said, and while he was thus absorbed the door opened, and turning at the sound he found himself face to face with his wife.
He had not reflected that Justine would be in her nurse's dress; and the sight of the dark blue uniform and small white cap, in which he had never seen her since their first meeting in the Hope Hospital, obliterated all bitter and unhappy memories, and gave him the illusion of passing back at once into the clear air of their early friendship. Then he looked at her and remembered.
He noticed that she had grown thinner than ever, or rather that her thinness, which had formerly had a healthy reed-like strength, now suggested fatigue and languor. And her face was spent, extinguished--the very eyes were lifeless. All her vitality seemed to have withdrawn itself into the arch of dense black hair which still clasped her forehead like the noble metal of some antique bust.
The sight stirred him with a deeper pity, a more vehement compunction; but the impulse to snatch her to him, and seek his pardon on her lips, was paralyzed by the sense that the three women in the window had stopped talking and turned their heads toward the door.
He held his hand out, and Justine's touched it for a moment; then he said in a low voice: "Is there no other place where I can see you?"
She made a negative gesture. "I am afraid not to-day."
Ah, her deep sweet voice--how completely his ear had lost the sound of it!
She looked doubtfully about the room, and pointed to a sofa at the end farthest from the windows.
Shall we sit there? she said.
He followed her in silence, and they sat down side by side. The matron had drawn up a chair and resumed her whispered conference with the women in the window. Between the two groups stretched the bare length of the room, broken only by a few arm-chairs of stained wood, and the marble-topped table covered with magazines.
The impossibility of giving free rein to his feelings developed in Amherst an unwonted intensity of perception, as though a sixth sense had suddenly emerged to take the place of those he could not use. And with this new-made faculty he seemed to gather up, and absorb into himself, as he had never done in their hours of closest communion, every detail of his wife's person, of her face and hands and gestures. He noticed how her full upper lids, of the tint of yellowish ivory, had a slight bluish discolouration, and how little thread-like blue veins ran across her temples to the roots of her hair. The emaciation of her face, and the hollow shades beneath her cheek-bones, made her mouth seem redder and fuller, though a little line on each side, where it joined the cheek, gave it a tragic droop. And her hands! When her fingers met his he recalled having once picked up, in the winter woods, the little feather-light skeleton of a frozen bird--and that was what her touch was like.
And it was he who had brought her to this by his cruelty, his obtuseness, his base readiness to believe the worst of her! He did not want to pour himself out in self-accusation--that seemed too easy a way of escape. He wanted simply to take her in his arms, to ask her to give him one more chance--and then to show her! And all the while he was paralyzed by the group in the window.
Can't we go out? I must speak to you, he began again nervously.
Not this afternoon--the doctor is coming. Tomorrow----
I can't wait for tomorrow!
She made a faint, imperceptible gesture, which read to his eyes: "You've waited a whole year."
Yes, I know, he returned, still constrained by the necessity of muffling his voice, of perpetually measuring the distance between themselves and the window. "I know what you might say--don't you suppose I've said it to myself a million times? But I didn't know--I couldn't imagine----"
She interrupted him with a rapid movement. "What do you know now?"
What you promised Langhope----
She turned her startled eyes on him, and he saw the blood run flame-like under her skin. "But _he_ promised not to speak!" she cried.
He hasn't--to me. But such things make themselves known. Should you have been content to go on in that way forever?
She raised her head and her eyes rested in his. "If you were," she answered simply.
Justine!
Again she checked him with a silencing motion. "Please tell me just what has happened."
Not now--there's too much else to say. And nothing matters except that I'm with you.
But Mr. Langhope----
He asks you to come. You're to see Cicely to-morrow.
Her lower lip trembled a little, and a tear flowed over and hung on her lashes.
But what does all that matter now? We're together after this horrible year, he insisted.
She looked at him again. "But what is really changed?"
Everything--everything! Not changed, I mean--just gone back.
To where...we were...before? she whispered; and he whispered back: "To where we were before."
There was a scraping of chairs on the floor, and with a sense of release Amherst saw that the colloquy in the window was over.
The two visitors, gathering their wraps about them, moved slowly across the room, still talking to the matron in excited undertones, through which, as they neared the threshold, the younger woman's staccato again broke out.
I tell you, if she does go back to him, it'll never be the same between them!
Oh, Cora, I wouldn't say that, the other ineffectually wailed; then they moved toward the door, and a moment later it had closed on them.
Amherst turned to his wife with outstretched arms. "Say you forgive me, Justine!"
She held back a little from his entreating hands, not reproachfully, but as if with a last scruple for himself.
There's nothing left...of the horror? she asked below her breath.
To be without you--that's the only horror!
You're _sure_----?
Sure!
It's just the same to you...just as it was...before?
Just the same, Justine!
It's not for myself, but you.
Then, for me--never speak of it! he implored.
Because it's _not_ the same, then? leapt from her.
Because it's wiped out--because it's never been!
Never?
Never!
He felt her yield to him at that, and under his eyes, close under his lips, was her face at last. But as they kissed they heard the handle of the door turn, and drew apart quickly, her hand lingering in his under the fold of her dress.
A nurse looked in, dressed in the white uniform and pointed cap of the hospital. Amherst fancied that she smiled a little as she saw them.
Miss Brent--the doctor wants you to come right up and give the morphine.
The door shut again as Justine rose to her feet. Amherst remained seated--he had made no motion to retain her hand as it slipped from him.
I'm coming, she called out to the retreating nurse; then she turned slowly and saw her husband's face.
I must go, she said in a low tone.
Her eyes met his for a moment; but he looked away again as he stood up and reached for his hat.
Tomorrow, then---- he said, without attempting to detain her.
Tomorrow?
You must come away from here--you must come home, he repeated mechanically.
She made no answer, and he held his hand out and took hers. "Tomorrow," he said, drawing her toward him; and their lips met again, but not in the same kiss.
JUNE again at Hanaford--and Cicely's birthday. The anniversary was to coincide, this year, with the opening of the old house at Hopewood, as a kind of pleasure-palace--gymnasium, concert-hall and museum--for the recreation of the mill-hands.
The idea had first come to Amherst on the winter afternoon when Bessy Westmore had confessed her love for him under the snow-laden trees of Hopewood. Even then the sense that his personal happiness was enlarged and secured by its promise of happiness to others had made him wish that the scene associated with the opening of his new life should be made to commemorate a corresponding change in the fortunes of Westmore. But when the control of the mills passed into his hands other and more necessary improvements pressed upon him; and it was not till now that the financial condition of the company had permitted the execution of his plan.
Justine, on her return to Hanaford, had found the work already in progress, and had been told by her husband that he was carrying out a projected scheme of Bessy's. She had felt a certain surprise, but had concluded that the plan in question dated back to the early days of his first marriage, when, in his wife's eyes, his connection with the mills still invested them with interest.
Since Justine had come back to her husband, both had tacitly avoided all allusions to the past, and the recreation-house at Hopewood being, as she divined, in some sort an expiatory offering to Bessy's plaintive shade, she had purposely refrained from questioning Amherst about its progress, and had simply approved the plans he submitted to her.
Fourteen months had passed since her return, and now, as she sat beside her husband in the carriage which was conveying them to Hopewood, she said to herself that her life had at last fallen into what promised to be its final shape--that as things now were they would probably be to the end. And outwardly at least they were what she and Amherst had always dreamed of their being. Westmore prospered under the new rule. The seeds of life they had sown there were springing up in a promising growth of bodily health and mental activity, and above all in a dawning social consciousness. The mill-hands were beginning to understand the meaning of their work, in its relation to their own lives and to the larger economy. And outwardly, also, the new growth was showing itself in the humanized aspect of the place. Amherst's young maples were tall enough now to cast a shade on the grass-bordered streets; and the well-kept turf, the bright cottage gardens, the new central group of library, hospital and club-house, gave to the mill-village the hopeful air of a "rising" residential suburb.
In the bright June light, behind their fresh green mantle of trees and creepers, even the factory buildings looked less stern and prison-like than formerly; and the turfing and planting of the adjoining river-banks had transformed a waste of foul mud and refuse into a little park where the operatives might refresh themselves at midday.
Yes--Westmore was alive at last: the dead city of which Justine had once spoken had risen from its grave, and its blank face had taken on a meaning. As Justine glanced at her husband she saw that the same thought was in his mind. However achieved, at whatever cost of personal misery and error, the work of awakening and freeing Westmore was done, and that work had justified itself.
She looked from Amherst to Cicely, who sat opposite, eager and rosy in her mourning frock--for Mr. Langhope had died some two months previously--and as intent as her step-parents on the scene before her. Cicely was old enough now to regard her connection with Westmore as something more than a nursery game. She was beginning to learn a great deal about the mills, and to understand, in simple, friendly ways, something of her own relation to them. The work and play of the children, the interests and relaxations provided for their elders, had been gradually explained to her by Justine, and she knew that this shining tenth birthday of hers was to throw its light as far as the clouds of factory-smoke extended.
As they mounted the slope to Hopewood, the spacious white building, with its enfolding colonnades, its broad terraces and tennis-courts, shone through the trees like some bright country-house adorned for its master's home-coming; and Amherst and his wife might have been driving up to the house which had been built to shelter their wedded happiness. The thought flashed across Justine as their carriage climbed the hill. She was as much absorbed as Amherst in the welfare of Westmore, it had become more and more, to both, the refuge in which their lives still met and mingled; but for a moment, as they paused before the flower-decked porch, and he turned to help her from the carriage, it occurred to her to wonder what her sensations would have been if he had been bringing her home--to a real home of their own--instead of accompanying her to another philanthropic celebration. But what need had they of a real home, when they no longer had any real life of their own? Nothing was left of that secret inner union which had so enriched and beautified their outward lives. Since Justine's return to Hanaford they had entered, tacitly, almost unconsciously, into a new relation to each other: a relation in which their personalities were more and more merged in their common work, so that, as it were, they met only by avoiding each other.
From the first, Justine had accepted this as inevitable; just as she had understood, when Amherst had sought her out in New York, that his remaining at Westmore, which had once been contingent on her leaving him, now depended on her willingness to return and take up their former life.
She accepted the last condition as she had accepted the other, pledged to the perpetual expiation of an act for which, in the abstract, she still refused to hold herself to blame. But life is not a matter of abstract principles, but a succession of pitiful compromises with fate, of concessions to old tradition, old beliefs, old charities and frailties. That was what her act had taught her--that was the word of the gods to the mortal who had laid a hand on their bolts. And she had humbled herself to accept the lesson, seeing human relations at last as a tangled and deep-rooted growth, a dark forest through which the idealist cannot cut his straight path without hearing at each stroke the cry of the severed branch: "_Why woundest thou me?_"
* * * * *
The lawns leading up to the house were already sprinkled with holiday-makers, while along the avenue came the rolling of wheels, the throb of motor-cars; and Justine, with Cicely beside her, stood in the wide hall to receive the incoming throng, in which Hanaford society was indiscriminately mingled with the operatives in their Sunday best.
While his wife welcomed the new arrivals, Amherst, supported by some young Westmore cousins, was guiding them into the concert-hall, where he was to say a word on the uses of the building before declaring it open for inspection. And presently Justine and Cicely, summoned by Westy Gaines, made their way through the rows of seats to a corner near the platform. Her husband was there already, with Halford Gaines and a group of Hanaford dignitaries, and just below them sat Mrs. Gaines and her daughters, the Harry Dressels, and Amherst's radiant mother.
As Justine passed between them, she wondered how much they knew of the events which had wrought so profound and permanent change in her life. She had never known how Hanaford explained her absence or what comments it had made on her return. But she saw to-day more clearly than ever that Amherst had become a power among his townsmen, and that if they were still blind to the inner meaning of his work, its practical results were beginning to impress them profoundly. Hanaford's sociological creed was largely based on commercial considerations, and Amherst had won Hanaford's esteem by the novel feat of defying its economic principles and snatching success out of his defiance.
And now he had advanced a step or two in front of the "representative" semi-circle on the platform, and was beginning to speak.
Justine did not hear his first words. She was looking up at him, trying to see him with the eyes of the crowd, and wondering what manner of man he would have seemed to her if she had known as little as they did of his inner history.
He held himself straight, the heavy locks thrown back from his forehead, one hand resting on the table beside him, the other grasping a folded blue-print which the architect of the building had just advanced to give him. As he stood there, Justine recalled her first sight of him in the Hope Hospital, five years earlier--was it only five years? They had dealt deep strokes to his face, hollowing the eye-sockets, accentuating the strong modelling of nose and chin, fixing the lines between the brows; but every touch had a meaning--it was not the languid hand of time which had remade his features, but the sharp chisel of thought and action.
She roused herself suddenly to the consciousness of what he was saying.
For the idea of this building--of a building dedicated to the recreation of Westmore--is not new in my mind; but while it remained there as a mere idea, it had already, without my knowledge, taken definite shape in the thoughts of the owner of Westmore.
There was a slight drop in his voice as he designated Bessy, and he waited a moment before continuing: "It was not till after the death of my first wife that I learned of her intention--that I found by accident, among her papers, this carefully-studied plan for a pleasure-house at Hopewood."
He paused again, and unrolling the blue-print, held it up before his audience.
You cannot, at this distance, he went on, "see all the admirable details of her plan; see how beautifully they were imagined, how carefully and intelligently elaborated. She who conceived them longed to see beauty everywhere--it was her dearest wish to bestow it on her people here. And her ardent imagination outran the bounds of practical possibility. We cannot give you, in its completeness, the beautiful thing she had imagined--the great terraces, the marble porches, the fountains, lily-tanks, and cloisters. But you will see that, wherever it was possible--though in humbler materials, and on a smaller scale--we have faithfully followed her design; and when presently you go through this building, and when, hereafter, you find health and refreshment and diversion here, I ask you to remember the beauty she dreamed of giving you, and to let the thought of it make her memory beautiful among you and among your children...."
Justine had listened with deepening amazement. She was seated so close to her husband that she had recognized the blue-print the moment he unrolled it. There was no mistaking its origin--it was simply the plan of the gymnasium which Bessy had intended to build at Lynbrook, and which she had been constrained to abandon owing to her husband's increased expenditure at the mills. But how was it possible that Amherst knew nothing of the original purpose of the plans, and by what mocking turn of events had a project devised in deliberate defiance of his wishes, and intended to declare his wife's open contempt for them, been transformed into a Utopian vision for the betterment of the Westmore operatives?
A wave of anger swept over Justine at this last derisive stroke of fate. It was grotesque and pitiable that a man like Amherst should create out of his regrets a being who had never existed, and then ascribe to her feelings and actions of which the real woman had again and again proved herself incapable!
Ah, no, Justine had suffered enough--but to have this imaginary Bessy called from the grave, dressed in a semblance of self-devotion and idealism, to see her petty impulses of vindictiveness disguised as the motions of a lofty spirit--it was as though her small malicious ghost had devised this way of punishing the wife who had taken her place!
Justine had suffered enough--suffered deliberately and unstintingly, paying the full price of her error, not seeking to evade its least consequence. But no sane judgment could ask her to sit quiet under this last hallucination. What! This unreal woman, this phantom that Amherst's uneasy imagination had evoked, was to come between himself and her, to supplant her first as his wife, and then as his fellow-worker? Why should she not cry out the truth to him, defend herself against the dead who came back to rob her of such wedded peace as was hers? She had only to tell the true story of the plans to lay poor Bessy's ghost forever!
The confused throbbing impulses within her were stifled under a long burst of applause--then she saw Westy Gaines at her side again, and understood that he had come to lead Cicely to the platform. For a moment she clung jealously to the child's hand, hardly aware of what she did, feeling only that she was being thrust farther and farther into the background of the life she had helped to call out of chaos. Then a contrary impulse moved her. She gently freed Cicely's hand, and a moment later, as she sat with bent head and throbbing breast, she heard the child's treble piping out above her:
In my mother's name, I give this house to Westmore.
Applause again--and then Justine found herself enveloped in a general murmur of compliment and congratulation. Mr. Amherst had spoken admirably--a "beautiful tribute--" ah, he had done poor Bessy justice! And to think that till now Hanaford had never fully known how she had the welfare of the mills at heart--how it was really only _her_ work that he was carrying on there! Well, he had made that perfectly clear--and no doubt Cicely was being taught to follow in her mother's footsteps: everyone had noticed how her step-father was associating her with the work at the mills. And his little speech would, as it were, consecrate the child's relation to that work, make it appear to her as the continuance of a beautiful, a sacred tradition....
* * * * *
And now it was over. The building had been inspected, the operatives had dispersed, the Hanaford company had rolled off down the avenue, Cicely, among them, driving away tired and happy in Mrs. Dressel's victoria, and Amherst and his wife were alone.
Amherst, after bidding good-bye to his last guests, had gone back to the empty concert-room to fetch the blue-print lying on the platform. He came back with it, between the uneven rows of empty chairs, and joined Justine, who stood waiting in the hall. His face was slightly flushed, and his eyes had the light which in happy moments burned through their veil of thought.
He laid his hand on his wife's arm, and drawing her toward a table spread out the blueprint before her.
You haven't seen this, have you? he said.
She looked down at the plan without answering, reading in the left-hand corner the architect's conventional inscription: "Swimming-tank and gymnasium designed for Mrs. John Amherst."
Amherst looked up, perhaps struck by her silence.
But perhaps you _have_ seen it--at Lynbrook? It must have been done while you were there.
The quickened throb of her blood rushed to her brain like a signal. "Speak--speak now!" the signal commanded.
Justine continued to look fixedly at the plan. "Yes, I have seen it," she said at length.
At Lynbrook?
At Lynbrook.
_She_ showed it to you, I suppose--while I was away?
Justine hesitated again. "Yes, while you were away."
And did she tell you anything about it, go into details about her wishes, her intentions?
Now was the moment--now! As her lips parted she looked up at her husband. The illumination still lingered on his face--and it was the face she loved. He was waiting eagerly for her next word.
No, I heard no details. I merely saw the plan lying there.
She saw his look of disappointment. "She never told you about it?"
No--she never told me.
It was best so, after all. She understood that now. It was now at last that she was paying her full price.
Amherst rolled up the plan with a sigh and pushed it into the drawer of the table. It struck her that he too had the look of one who has laid a ghost. He turned to her and drew her hand through his arm.
You're tired, dear. You ought to have driven back with the others, he said.
No, I would rather stay with you.
You want to drain this good day to the dregs, as I do?
Yes, she murmured, drawing her hand away.
It _is_ a good day, isn't it? he continued, looking about him at the white-panelled walls, the vista of large bright rooms seen through the folding doors. "I feel as if we had reached a height, somehow--a height where one might pause and draw breath for the next climb. Don't you feel that too, Justine?"
Yes--I feel it.
Do you remember once, long ago--one day when you and I and Cicely went on a picnic to hunt orchids--how we got talking of the one best moment in life--the moment when one wanted most to stop the clock?
The colour rose in her face while he spoke. It was a long time since he had referred to the early days of their friendship--the days _before_....
Yes, I remember, she said.
And do you remember how we said that it was with most of us as it was with Faust? That the moment one wanted to hold fast to was not, in most lives, the moment of keenest personal happiness, but the other kind--the kind that would have seemed grey and colourless at first: the moment when the meaning of life began to come out from the mists--when one could look out at last over the marsh one had drained?
A tremor ran through Justine. "It was you who said that," she said, half-smiling.
But didn't you feel it with me? Don't you now?
Yes--I do now, she murmured.
He came close to her, and taking her hands in his, kissed them one after the other.
Dear, he said, "let us go out and look at the marsh we have drained."
He turned and led her through the open doorway to the terrace above the river. The sun was setting behind the wooded slopes of Hopewood, and the trees about the house stretched long blue shadows across the lawn. Beyond them rose the smoke of Westmore.
Transcriber's Note:
Most inconsistencies in hyphenation and spelling have been left as in the original. Missing or wrong punctuation has been added or corrected, where it is obvious (missing punctuation is often a result of the scanning/OCR process). In one case, a missing letter has also been added, and the following misspellings have been corrected: involuntairly to involuntarily, sensastions to sensations, Wetsmore to Westmore, Cilfton to Clifton, It to If.