The Fruit of the Tree by Edith Wharton (best large ebook reader txt) 📖

an invisible tide. "Don't talk like that! I can't endure to be humoured like a baby. I am unhappy because I can't see why all these wretched questions should be dragged into our life. I hate to have you always disagreeing with Mr. Tredegar, who is so clever and has so much experience; and yet I hate to see you give way to him, because that makes it appear as if...as if...."

"He didn't care a straw for my ideas?" Amherst smiled. "Well, he doesn't--and I never dreamed of making him. So don't worry about that either."

"You never dreamed of making him care for your ideas? But then why do you----"

"Why do I go on setting them forth at such great length?" Amherst smiled again. "To convince you--that's my only ambition."

She stared at him, shaking her head back to toss a loose lock from her puzzled eyes. A tear still shone on her lashes, but with the motion it fell and trembled down her cheek.

"To convince _me_? But you know I am so ignorant of such things."

"Most women are."

"I never pretended to understand anything about--economics, or whatever you call it."

"No."

"Then how----"

He turned and looked at her gently. "I thought you might have begun to understand something about _me_."

"About you?" The colour flowered softly under her clear skin.

"About what my ideas on such subjects were likely to be worth--judging from what you know of me in other respects." He paused and glanced away from her. "Well," he concluded deliberately, "I suppose I've had my answer tonight."

"Oh, John----!"

He rose and wandered across the room, pausing a moment to finger absently the trinkets on the dressing-table. The act recalled with a curious vividness certain dulled sensations of their first days together, when to handle and examine these frail little accessories of her toilet had been part of the wonder and amusement of his new existence. He could still hear her laugh as she leaned over him, watching his mystified look in the glass, till their reflected eyes met there and drew down her lips to his. He laid down the fragrant powder-puff he had been turning slowly between his fingers, and moved back toward the bed. In the interval he had reached a decision.

"Well--isn't it natural that I should think so?" he began again, as he stood beside her. "When we married I never expected you to care or know much about economics. It isn't a quality a man usually chooses his wife for. But I had a fancy--perhaps it shows my conceit--that when we had lived together a year or two, and you'd found out what kind of a fellow I was in other ways--ways any woman can judge of--I had a fancy that you might take my opinions on faith when it came to my own special business--the thing I'm generally supposed to know about."

He knew that he was touching a sensitive chord, for Bessy had to the full her sex's pride of possessorship. He was human and faulty till others criticized him--then he became a god. But in this case a conflicting influence restrained her from complete response to his appeal.

"I _do_ feel sure you know--about the treatment of the hands and all that; but you said yourself once--the first time we ever talked about Westmore--that the business part was different----"

Here it was again, the ancient ineradicable belief in the separable body and soul! Even an industrial organization was supposed to be subject to the old theological distinction, and Bessy was ready to co-operate with her husband in the emancipation of Westmore's spiritual part if only its body remained under the law.

Amherst controlled his impatience, as it was always easy for him to do when he had fixed on a definite line of conduct.

"It was my situation that was different; not what you call the business part. That is inextricably bound up with the treatment of the hands. If I am to have anything to do with the mills now I can deal with them only as your representative; and as such I am bound to take in the whole question."

Bessy's face clouded: was he going into it all again? But he read her look and went on reassuringly: "That was what I meant by saying that I hoped you would take me on faith. If I want the welfare of Westmore it's above all, I believe, because I want Westmore to see you as _I_ do--as the dispenser of happiness, who could not endure to benefit by any wrong or injustice to others."

"Of course, of course I don't want to do them injustice!"

"Well, then----"

He had seated himself beside her again, clasping in his the hand with which she was fretting the lace-edged sheet. He felt her restless fingers surrender slowly, and her eyes turned to him in appeal.

"But I care for what people say of you too! And you know--it's horrid, but one must consider it--if they say you're spending my money imprudently...." The blood rose to her neck and face. "I don't mind for myself...even if I have to give up as many things as papa and Mr. Tredegar think...but there is Cicely...and if people said...."

"If people said I was spending Cicely's money on improving the condition of the people to whose work she will some day owe all her wealth--" Amherst paused: "Well, I would rather hear that said of me than any other thing I can think of, except one."

"Except what?"

"That I was doing it with her mother's help and approval."

She drew a long tremulous sigh: he knew it was always a relief to her to have him assert himself strongly. But a residue of resistance still clouded her mind.

"I should always want to help you, of course; but if Mr. Tredegar and Halford Gaines think your plan unbusinesslike----"

"Mr. Tredegar and Halford Gaines are certain to think it so. And that is why I said, just now, that it comes, in the end, to your choosing between us; taking them on experience or taking me on faith."

She looked at him wistfully. "Of course I should expect to give up things.... You wouldn't want me to live here?"

"I should not ask you to," he said, half-smiling.

"I suppose there would be a good many things we couldn't do----"

"You would certainly have less money for a number of years; after that, I believe you would have more rather than less; but I should not want you to think that, beyond a reasonable point, the prosperity of the mills was ever to be measured by your dividends."

"No." She leaned back wearily among the pillows. "I suppose, for instance, we should have to give up Europe this summer----?"

Here at last was the bottom of her thought! It was always on the immediate pleasure that her soul hung: she had not enough imagination to look beyond, even in the projecting of her own desires. And it was on his knowledge of this limitation that Amherst had deliberately built.

"I don't see how you could go to Europe," he said.

"The doctor thinks I need it," she faltered.

"In that case, of course--" He stood up, not abruptly, or with any show of irritation, but as if accepting this as her final answer. "What you need most, in the meantime, is a little sleep," he said. "I will tell your maid not to disturb you in the morning." He had returned to his soothing way of speech, as though definitely resigned to the inutility of farther argument. "And I will say goodbye now," he continued, "because I shall probably take an early train, before you wake----"

She sat up with a start. "An early train? Why, where are you going?"

"I must go to Chicago some time this month, and as I shall not be wanted here tomorrow I might as well run out there at once, and join you next week at Lynbrook."

Bessy had grown pale. "But I don't understand----"

Their eyes met. "Can't you understand that I am human enough to prefer, under the circumstances, not being present at tomorrow's meeting?" he said with a dry laugh.

She sank back with a moan of discouragement, turning her face away as he began to move toward his room.

"Shall I put the light out?" he asked, pausing with his hand on the electric button.

"Yes, please."

He pushed in the button and walked on, guided through the obscurity by the line of light under his door. As he reached the threshold he heard a little choking cry.

"John--oh, John!"

He paused.

"I can't _bear_ it!" The sobs increased.

"Bear what?"

"That you should hate me----"

"Don't be foolish," he said, groping for his door-handle.

"But you do hate me--and I deserve it!"

"Nonsense, dear. Try to sleep."

"I can't sleep till you've forgiven me. Say you don't hate me! I'll do anything...only say you don't hate me!"

He stood still a moment, thinking; then he turned back, and made his way across the room to her side. As he sat down beside her, he felt her arms reach for his neck and her wet face press itself against his cheek.

"I'll do anything..." she sobbed; and in the darkness he held her to him and hated his victory.


XIII

MRS. ANSELL was engaged in what she called picking up threads. She had been abroad for the summer--had, in, fact, transferred herself but a few hours earlier from her returning steamer to the little station at Lynbrook--and was now, in the bright September afternoon, which left her in sole possession of the terrace of Lynbrook House, using that pleasant eminence as a point of observation from which to gather up some of the loose ends of history dropped at her departure.

It might have been thought that the actual scene out-spread below her--the descending gardens, the tennis-courts, the farm-lands sloping away to the blue sea-like shimmer of the Hempstead plains--offered, at the moment, little material for her purpose; but that was to view them with a superficial eye. Mrs. Ansell's trained gaze was, for example, greatly enlightened by the fact that the tennis-courts were fringed by a group of people indolently watchful of the figures agitating themselves about the nets; and that, as she turned her head toward the entrance avenue, the receding view of a station omnibus, followed by a luggage-cart, announced that more guests were to be added to those who had almost taxed to its limits the expansibility of the luncheon-table.

All this, to the initiated eye, was full of suggestion; but its significance was as nothing to that presented by the approach of two figures which, as Mrs. Ansell watched, detached themselves from the cluster about the tennis-ground and struck, obliquely and at a desultory pace, across the lawn toward the terrace. The figures--those of a slight young man with stooping shoulders, and of a lady equally youthful but slenderly erect--moved forward in absorbed communion, as if unconscious of their surroundings and indefinite as to their direction, till, on the brink of the wide grass terrace just below their observer's parapet, they paused a moment and faced each other in closer speech. This interchange of words, though brief in measure of time, lasted long enough to add a vivid strand to Mrs. Ansell's thickening skein; then, on a gesture of the lady's, and without signs of formal leave-taking, the young man struck into a path which