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

she did justice to his efforts to accept the irretrievable, and to waken in his wife some capacity for sharing in his minor interests, since she had none of her own with which to fill their days.

Amherst had always been a reader; not, like Justine herself, a flame-like devourer of the page, but a slow absorber of its essence; and in the early days of his marriage he had fancied it would be easy to make Bessy share this taste. Though his mother was not a bookish woman, he had breathed at her side an air rich in allusion and filled with the bright presences of romance; and he had always regarded this commerce of the imagination as one of the normal conditions of life. The discovery that there were no books at Lynbrook save a few morocco "sets" imprisoned behind the brass trellisings of the library had been one of the many surprises of his new state. But in his first months with Bessy there was no room for books, and if he thought of the matter it was only in a glancing vision of future evenings, when he and she, in the calm afterglow of happiness, should lean together over some cherished page. Her lack of response to any reference outside the small circle of daily facts had long since dispelled that vision; but now that his own mind felt the need of inner sustenance he began to ask himself whether he might not have done more to rouse her imagination. During the long evenings over the library fire he tried to lead the talk to books, with a parenthesis, now and again, from the page beneath his eye; and Bessy met the experiment with conciliatory eagerness. She showed, in especial, a hopeful but misleading preference for poetry, leaning back with dreaming lids and lovely parted lips while he rolled out the immortal measures; but her outward signs of attention never ripened into any expression of opinion, or any after-allusion to what she heard, and before long he discovered that Justine Brent was his only listener. It was to her that the words he read began to be unconsciously addressed; her comments directed him in his choice of subjects, and the ensuing discussions restored him to some semblance of mental activity.

Bessy, true to her new rôle of acquiescence, shone silently on this interchange of ideas; Amherst even detected in her a vague admiration for his power of conversing on subjects which she regarded as abstruse; and this childlike approval, combined with her submission to his will, deluded him with a sense of recovered power over her. He could not but note that the new phase in their relations had coincided with his first assertion of mastery; and he rashly concluded that, with the removal of the influences tending to separate them, his wife might gradually be won back to her earlier sympathy with his views.

To accept this theory was to apply it; for nothing could long divert Amherst from his main purpose, and all the thwarted strength of his will was only gathering to itself fresh stores of energy. He had never been a skilful lover, for no woman had as yet stirred in him those feelings which call the finer perceptions into play; and there was no instinct to tell him that Bessy's sudden conformity to his wishes was as unreasoning as her surrender to his first kiss. He fancied that he and she were at length reaching some semblance of that moral harmony which should grow out of the physical accord, and that, poor and incomplete as the understanding was, it must lift and strengthen their relation.

He waited till early winter had brought solitude to Lynbrook, dispersing the hunting colony to various points of the compass, and sending Mr. Langhope to Egypt and the Riviera, while Mrs. Ansell, as usual, took up her annual tour of a social circuit whose extreme points were marked by Boston and Baltimore--and then he made his final appeal to his wife.

His pretext for speaking was a letter from Duplain, definitely announcing his resolve not to remain at Westmore. A year earlier Amherst, deeply moved by the letter, would have given it to his wife in the hope of its producing the same effect on her. He knew better now--he had learned her instinct for detecting "business" under every serious call on her attention. His only hope, as always, was to reach her through the personal appeal; and he put before her the fact of Duplain's withdrawal as the open victory of his antagonists. But he saw at once that even this could not infuse new life into the question.

"If I go back he'll stay--I can hold him, can gain time till things take a turn," he urged.

"Another? I thought they were definitely settled," she objected languidly.

"No--they're not; they can't be, on such a basis," Amherst broke out with sudden emphasis. He walked across the room, and came back to her side with a determined face. "It's a delusion, a deception," he exclaimed, "to think I can stand by any longer and see things going to ruin at Westmore! If I've made you think so, I've unconsciously deceived us both. As long as you're my wife we've only one honour between us, and that honour is mine to take care of."

"Honour? What an odd expression!" she said with a forced laugh, and a little tinge of pink in her cheek. "You speak as if I had--had made myself talked about --when you know I've never even looked at another man!"

"Another man?" Amherst looked at her in wonder. "Good God! Can't you conceive of any vow to be kept between husband and wife but the primitive one of bodily fidelity? Heaven knows I've never looked at another woman--but, by my reading of our compact, I shouldn't be keeping faith with you if I didn't help you to keep faith with better things. And you owe me the same help--the same chance to rise through you, and not sink by you--else we've betrayed each other more deeply than any adultery could make us!"

She had drawn back, turning pale again, and shrinking a little at the sound of words which, except when heard in church, she vaguely associated with oaths, slammed doors, and other evidences of ill-breeding; but Amherst had been swept too far on the flood of his indignation to be checked by such small signs of disapproval.

"You'll say that what I'm asking you is to give me back the free use of your money. Well! Why not? Is it so much for a wife to give? I know you all think that a man who marries a rich woman forfeits his self-respect if he spends a penny without her approval. But that's because money is so sacred to you all! It seems to me the least important thing that a woman entrusts to her husband. What of her dreams and her hopes, her belief in justice and goodness and decency? If he takes those and destroys them, he'd better have had a mill-stone about his neck. But nobody has a word to say till he touches her dividends--then he's a calculating brute who has married her for her fortune!"

He had come close again, facing her with outstretched hands, half-commanding, half in appeal. "Don't you see that I can't go on in this way--that I've _no right_ to let you keep me from Westmore?"

Bessy was looking at him coldly, under the half-dropped lids of indifference. "I hardly know what you mean--you use such peculiar words; but I don't see why you should expect me to give up all the ideas I was brought up in. Our standards _are_ different--but why should yours always be right?"

"You believed they were right when you married me--have they changed since then?"

"No; but----" Her face seemed to harden and contract into a small expressionless mask, in which he could no longer read anything but blank opposition to his will.

"You trusted my judgment not long ago," he went on, "when I asked you to give up seeing Mrs. Carbury----"

She flushed, but with anger, not compunction. "It seems to me that should be a reason for your not asking me to make other sacrifices! When I gave up Blanche I thought you would see that I wanted to please you--and that you would do something for me in return...."

Amherst interrupted her with a laugh. "Thank you for telling me your real reasons. I was fool enough to think you acted from conviction--not that you were simply striking a bargain----"

He broke off, and they looked at each other with a kind of fear, each hearing between them the echo of irreparable words. Amherst's only clear feeling was that he must not speak again till he had beaten down the horrible sensation in his breast--the rage of hate which had him in its grip, and which made him almost afraid, while it lasted, to let his eyes rest on the fair weak creature before him. Bessy, too, was in the clutch of a mute anger which slowly poured its benumbing current around her heart. Strong waves of passion did not quicken her vitality: she grew inert and cold under their shock. Only one little pulse of self-pity continued to beat in her, trembling out at last on the cry: "Ah, I know it's not because you care so much for Westmore--it's only because you want to get away from me!"

Amherst stared as if her words had flashed a light into the darkest windings of his misery. "Yes--I want to get away..." he said; and he turned and walked out of the room.

He went down to the smoking-room, and ringing for a servant, ordered his horse to be saddled. The foot-man who answered his summons brought the afternoon's mail, and Amherst, throwing himself down on the sofa, began to tear open his letters while he waited.

He ran through the first few without knowing what he read; but presently his attention was arrested by the hand-writing of a man he had known well in college, and who had lately come into possession of a large cotton-mill in the South. He wrote now to ask if Amherst could recommend a good manager--"not one of your old routine men, but a young fellow with the new ideas. Things have been in pretty bad shape down here," the writer added, "and now that I'm in possession I want to see what can be done to civilize the place"; and he went on to urge that Amherst should come down himself to inspect the mills, and propose such improvements as his experience suggested. "We've all heard of the great things you're doing at Westmore," the letter ended; and Amherst cast it from him with a groan....

It was Duplain's chance, of course...that was his first thought. He took up the letter and read it over. He knew the man who wrote--no sentimentalist seeking emotional variety from vague philanthropic experiments, but a serious student of social conditions, now unexpectedly provided with the opportunity to apply his ideas. Yes, it was Duplain's chance--if indeed it might not be his own!... Amherst sat upright, dazzled by the thought. Why Duplain--why not himself? Bessy had spoken the illuminating word--what he wanted was to get away--to get away at any cost! Escape had become his one thought: escape from the bondage of Lynbrook, from the bitter memory of his failure at Westmore; and here was the chance to escape back into life--into independence, activity and usefulness! Every atrophied faculty in him suddenly started from its torpor, and his brain throbbed with the pain of the awakening.... The servant came to tell him that his horse waited,