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

and he sprang up, took his riding-whip from the rack, stared a moment, absently, after the man's retreating back, and then dropped down again on the sofa....

What was there to keep him from accepting? His wife's affection was dead--if her sentimental fancy for him had ever deserved the name! And his passing mastery over her was gone too--he smiled to remember that, hardly two hours earlier, he had been fatuous enough to think he could still regain it! Now he said to himself that she would sooner desert a friend to please him than sacrifice a fraction of her income; and the discovery cast a stain of sordidness on their whole relation. He could still imagine struggling to win her back from another man, or even to save her from some folly into which mistaken judgment or perverted enthusiasm might have hurried her; but to go on battling against the dull unimaginative subservience to personal luxury--the slavery to houses and servants and clothes--ah, no, while he had any fight left in him it was worth spending in a better cause than that!

Through the open window he could hear, in the mild December stillness, his horse's feet coming and going on the gravel. _Her_ horse, led up and down by _her_ servant, at the door of _her_ house!... The sound symbolized his whole future...the situation his marriage had made for him, and to which he must henceforth bend, unless he broke with it then and there.... He tried to look ahead, to follow up, one by one, the consequences of such a break. That it would be final he had no doubt. There are natures which seem to be drawn closer by dissension, to depend, for the renewal of understanding, on the spark of generosity and compunction that anger strikes out of both; but Amherst knew that between himself and his wife no such clearing of the moral atmosphere was possible. The indignation which left him with tingling nerves and a burning need of some immediate escape into action, crystallized in Bessy into a hard kernel of obstinacy, into which, after each fresh collision, he felt that a little more of herself had been absorbed.... No, the break between them would be final--if he went now he would not come back. And it flashed across him that this solution might have been foreseen by his wife--might even have been deliberately planned and led up to by those about her. His father-in-law had never liked him--the disturbing waves of his activity had rippled even the sheltered surface of Mr. Langhope's existence. He must have been horribly in their way! Well--it was not too late to take himself out of it. In Bessy's circle the severing of such ties was regarded as an expensive but unhazardous piece of surgery--nobody bled to death of the wound.... The footman came back to remind him that his horse was waiting, and Amherst rose to his feet.

"Send him back to the stable," he said with a glance at his watch, "and order a trap to take me to the next train."


XXII

WHEN Amherst woke, the next morning, in the hotel to which he had gone up from Lynbrook, he was oppressed by the sense that the hardest step he had to take still lay before him. It had been almost easy to decide that the moment of separation had come, for circumstances seemed to have closed every other issue from his unhappy situation; but how tell his wife of his decision? Amherst, to whom action was the first necessity of being, became a weak procrastinator when he was confronted by the need of writing instead of speaking.

To account for his abrupt departure from Lynbrook he had left word that he was called to town on business; but, since he did not mean to return, some farther explanation was now necessary, and he was paralyzed by the difficulty of writing. He had already telegraphed to his friend that he would be at the mills the next day; but the southern express did not leave till the afternoon, and he still had several hours in which to consider what he should say to his wife. To postpone the dreaded task, he invented the pretext of some business to be despatched, and taking the Subway to Wall Street consumed the morning in futile activities. But since the renunciation of his work at Westmore he had no active concern with the financial world, and by twelve o'clock he had exhausted his imaginary affairs and was journeying up town again. He left the train at Union Square, and walked along Fourth Avenue, now definitely resolved to go back to the hotel and write his letter before lunching.

At Twenty-sixth Street he had struck into Madison Avenue, and was striding onward with the fixed eye and aimless haste of the man who has empty hours to fill, when a hansom drew up ahead of him and Justine Brent sprang out. She was trimly dressed, as if for travel, with a small bag in her hand; but at sight of him she paused with a cry of pleasure.

"Oh, Mr. Amherst, I'm so glad! I was afraid I might not see you for goodbye."

"For goodbye?" Amherst paused, embarrassed. How had she guessed that he did not mean to return to Lynbrook?

"You know," she reminded him, "I'm going to some friends near Philadelphia for ten days"--and he remembered confusedly that a long time ago--probably yesterday morning--he had heard her speak of her projected visit.

"I had no idea," she continued, "that you were coming up to town yesterday, or I should have tried to see you before you left. I wanted to ask you to send me a line if Bessy needs me--I'll come back at once if she does." Amherst continued to listen blankly, as if making a painful effort to regain some consciousness of what was being said to him, and she went on: "She seemed so nervous and poorly yesterday evening that I was sorry I had decided to go----"

Her intent gaze reminded him that the emotions of the last twenty-four hours must still be visible in his face; and the thought of what she might detect helped to restore his self-possession. "You must not think of giving up your visit," he began hurriedly--he had meant to add "on account of Bessy," but he found himself unable to utter his wife's name.

Justine was still looking at him. "Oh, I'm sure everything will be all right," she rejoined. "You go back this afternoon, I suppose? I've left you a little note, with my address, and I want you to promise----"

She paused, for Amherst had made a motion as though to interrupt her. The old confused sense that there must always be truth between them was struggling in him with the strong restraints of habit and character; and suddenly, before he was conscious of having decided to speak, he heard himself say: "I ought to tell you that I am not going back."

"Not going back?" A flash of apprehension crossed Justine's face. "Not till tomorrow, you mean?" she added, recovering herself.

Amherst hesitated, glancing vaguely up and down the street. At that noonday hour it was nearly deserted, and Justine's driver dozed on his perch above the hansom. They could speak almost as openly as if they had been in one of the wood-paths at Lynbrook.

"Nor tomorrow," Amherst said in a low voice. There was another pause before he added: "It may be some time before--" He broke off, and then continued with an effort: "The fact is, I am thinking of going back to my old work."

She caught him up with an exclamation of surprise and sympathy. "Your old work? You mean at----"

She was checked by the quick contraction of pain in his face. "Not that! I mean that I'm thinking of taking a new job--as manager of a Georgia mill.... It's the only thing I know how to do, and I've got to do something--" He forced a laugh. "The habit of work is incurable!"

Justine's face had grown as grave as his. She hesitated a moment, looking down the street toward the angle of Madison Square, which was visible from the corner where they stood.

"Will you walk back to the square with me? Then we can sit down a moment."

She began to move as she spoke, and he walked beside her in silence till they had gained the seat she pointed out. Her hansom trailed after them, drawing up at the corner.

As Amherst sat down beside her, Justine turned to him with an air of quiet resolution. "Mr. Amherst--will you let me ask you something? Is this a sudden decision?"

"Yes. I decided yesterday."

"And Bessy----?"

His glance dropped for the first time, but Justine pressed her point. "Bessy approves?"

"She--she will, I think--when she knows----"

"When she knows?" Her emotion sprang into her face. "When she knows? Then she does not--yet?"

"No. The offer came suddenly. I must go at once."

"Without seeing her?" She cut him short with a quick commanding gesture. "Mr. Amherst, you can't do this--you won't do it! You will not go away without seeing Bessy!" she said.

Her eyes sought his and drew them upward, constraining them to meet the full beam of her rebuking gaze.

"I must do what seems best under the circumstances," he answered hesitatingly. "She will hear from me, of course; I shall write today--and later----"

"Not later! _Now_--you will go back now to Lynbrook! Such things can't be told in writing--if they must be said at all, they must be spoken. Don't tell me that I don't understand--or that I'm meddling in what doesn't concern me. I don't care a fig for that! I've always meddled in what didn't concern me--I always shall, I suppose, till I die! And I understand enough to know that Bessy is very unhappy--and that you're the wiser and stronger of the two. I know what it's been to you to give up your work--to feel yourself useless," she interrupted herself, with softening eyes, "and I know how you've tried...I've watched you...but Bessy has tried too; and even if you've both failed--if you've come to the end of your resources--it's for you to face the fact, and help her face it--not to run away from it like this!"

Amherst sat silent under the assault of her eloquence. He was conscious of no instinctive resentment, no sense that she was, as she confessed, meddling in matters which did not concern her. His ebbing spirit was revived by the shock of an ardour like his own. She had not shrunk from calling him a coward--and it did him good to hear her call him so! Her words put life back into its true perspective, restored their meaning to obsolete terms: to truth and manliness and courage. He had lived so long among equivocations that he had forgotten how to look a fact in the face; but here was a woman who judged life by his own standards--and by those standards she had found him wanting!

Still, he could not forget the last bitter hours, or change his opinion as to the futility of attempting to remain at Lynbrook. He felt as strongly as ever the need of moral and mental liberation--the right to begin life again on his own terms. But Justine Brent had made him see that his first step toward self-assertion had been the inconsistent one of trying to evade its results.

"You are right--I will go back," he said.

She thanked him with her eyes, as she had thanked him on the terrace at Lynbrook, on the