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

knowing it herself...."

She paused, and laid down her pen. Why did it make her so happy to write to him? Was it merely the sense of recovered helpfulness, or something warmer, more personal, that made it a joy to trace his name, and to remind him of their last intimate exchange of words? Well--perhaps it was that too. There were moments when she was so mortally lonely that any sympathetic contact with another life sent a glow into her veins--that she was thankful to warm herself at any fire.


XXV

BESSY, languidly glancing through her midday mail some five days later, uttered a slight exclamation as she withdrew her finger-tip from the flap of the envelope she had begun to open.

It was a black sleety day, with an east wind bowing the trees beyond the drenched window-panes, and the two friends, after luncheon, had withdrawn to the library, where Justine sat writing notes for Bessy, while the latter lay back in her arm-chair, in the state of dreamy listlessness into which she always sank when not under the stimulus of amusement or exercise.

She sat suddenly upright as her eyes fell on the letter.

"I beg your pardon! I thought it was for me," she said, holding it out to Justine.

The latter reddened as she glanced at the superscription. It had not occurred to her that Amherst would reply to her appeal: she had pictured him springing on the first north-bound train, perhaps not even pausing to announce his return to his wife.... And to receive his letter under Bessy's eye was undeniably embarrassing, since Justine felt the necessity of keeping her intervention secret.

But under Bessy's eye she certainly was--it continued to rest on her curiously, speculatively, with an under-gleam of malicious significance.

"So stupid of me--I can't imagine why I should have expected my husband to write to me!" Bessy went on, leaning back in lazy contemplation of her other letters, but still obliquely including Justine in her angle of vision.

The latter, after a moment's pause, broke the seal and read.

"Millfield, Georgia.
"My dear Miss Brent,

"Your letter reached me yesterday and I have thought it over
carefully. I appreciate the feeling that prompted it--but I don't
know that any friend, however kind and discerning, can give the
final advice in such matters. You tell me you are sure my wife will
not ask me to return--well, under present conditions that seems to
me a sufficient reason for staying away.

"Meanwhile, I assure you that I have remembered all you said to me
that day. I have made no binding arrangement here--nothing to
involve my future action--and I have done this solely because you
asked it. This will tell you better than words how much I value
your advice, and what strong reasons I must have for not following
it now.

"I suppose there are no more exploring parties in this weather. I
wish I could show Cicely some of the birds down here.

"Yours faithfully,
"John Amherst.

"Please don't let my wife ride Impulse."

Latent under Justine's acute consciousness of what this letter meant, was the sense of Bessy's inferences and conjectures. She could feel them actually piercing the page in her hand like some hypersensitive visual organ to which matter offers no obstruction. Or rather, baffled in their endeavour, they were evoking out of the unseen, heaven knew what fantastic structure of intrigue--scrawling over the innocent page with burning evidences of perfidy and collusion....

One thing became instantly clear to her: she must show the letter to Bessy. She ran her eyes over it again, trying to disentangle the consequences. There was the allusion to their talk in town--well, she had told Bessy of that! But the careless reference to their woodland excursions--what might not Bessy, in her present mood, make of it? Justine's uppermost thought was of distress at the failure of her plan. Perhaps she might still have induced Amherst to come back, had it not been for this accident; but now that hope was destroyed.

She raised her eyes and met Bessy's. "Will you read it?" she said, holding out the letter.

Bessy received it with lifted brows, and a protesting murmur--but as she read, Justine saw the blood mount under her clear skin, invade the temples, the nape, even the little flower-like ears; then it receded as suddenly, ebbing at last from the very lips, so that the smile with which she looked up from her reading was as white as if she had been under the stress of physical pain.

"So you have written my husband to come back?"

"As you see."

Bessy looked her straight in the eyes. "I am very much obliged to you--extremely obliged!"

Justine met the look quietly. "Which means that you resent my interference----"

"Oh, I leave you to call it that!" Bessy mocked, tossing the letter down on the table at her side.

"Bessy! Don't take it in that way. If I made a mistake I did so with the hope of helping you. How can I stand by, after all these months together, and see you deliberately destroying your life without trying to stop you?"

The smile withered on Bessy's lips. "It is very dear and good of you--I know you're never happy unless you're helping people--but in this case I can only repeat what my husband says. He and I don't often look at things in the same light--but I quite agree with him that the management of such matters is best left to--to the persons concerned."

Justine hesitated. "I might answer that, if you take that view, it was inconsistent of you to talk with me so openly. You've certainly made me feel that you wanted help--you've turned to me for it. But perhaps that does not justify my writing to Mr. Amherst without your knowing it."

Bessy laughed. "Ah, my dear, you knew that if you asked me the letter would never be sent!"

"Perhaps I did," said Justine simply. "I was trying to help you against your will."

"Well, you see the result." Bessy laid a derisive touch on the letter. "Do you understand now whose fault it is if I am alone?"

Justine faced her steadily. "There is nothing in Mr. Amherst's letter to make me change my opinion. I still think it lies with you to bring him back."

Bessy raised a glittering face to her--all hardness and laughter. "Such modesty, my dear! As if I had a chance of succeeding where you failed!"

She sprang up, brushing the curls from her temples with a petulant gesture. "Don't mind me if I'm cross--but I've had a dose of preaching from Maria Ansell, and I don't know why my friends should treat me like a puppet without any preferences of my own, and press me upon a man who has done his best to show that he doesn't want me. As a matter of fact, he and I are luckily agreed on that point too--and I'm afraid all the good advice in the world won't persuade us to change our opinion!"

Justine held her ground. "If I believed that of either of you, I shouldn't have written--I should not be pleading with you now--And Mr. Amherst doesn't believe it either," she added, after a pause, conscious of the risk she was taking, but thinking the words might act like a blow in the face of a person sinking under a deadly narcotic.

Bessy's smile deepened to a sneer. "I see you've talked me over thoroughly--and on _his_ views I ought perhaps not to have risked an opinion----"

"We have not talked you over," Justine exclaimed. "Mr. Amherst could never talk of you...in the way you think...." And under the light staccato of Bessy's laugh she found resolution to add: "It is not in that way that I know what he feels."

"Ah? I should be curious to hear, then----"

Justine turned to the letter, which still lay between them. "Will you read the last sentence again? The postscript, I mean."

Bessy, after a surprised glance at her, took the letter up with the deprecating murmur of one who acts under compulsion rather than dispute about a trifle.

"The postscript? Let me see...'Don't let my wife ride Impulse.'--_Et puis?_" she murmured, dropping the page again.

"Well, does it tell you nothing? It's a cold letter--at first I thought so--the letter of a man who believes himself deeply hurt--so deeply that he will make no advance, no sign of relenting. That's what I thought when I first read it...but the postscript undoes it all."

Justine, as she spoke, had drawn near Bessy, laying a hand on her arm, and shedding on her the radiance of a face all charity and sweet compassion. It was her rare gift, at such moments, to forget her own relation to the person for whose fate she was concerned, to cast aside all consciousness of criticism and distrust in the heart she strove to reach, as pitiful people forget their physical timidity in the attempt to help a wounded animal.

For a moment Bessy seemed to waver. The colour flickered faintly up her cheek, her long lashes drooped--she had the tenderest lids!--and all her face seemed melting under the beams of Justine's ardour. But the letter was still in her hand--her eyes, in sinking, fell upon it, and she sounded beneath her breath the fatal phrase: "'I have done this solely because you asked it.'

"After such a tribute to your influence I don't wonder you feel competent to set everybody's affairs in order! But take my advice, my dear--_don't_ ask me not to ride Impulse!"

The pity froze on Justine's lip: she shrank back cut to the quick. For a moment the silence between the two women rang with the flight of arrowy, wounding thoughts; then Bessy's anger flagged, she gave one of her embarrassed half-laughs, and turning back, laid a deprecating touch on her friend's arm.

"I didn't mean that, Justine...but let us not talk now--I can't!"

Justine did not move: the reaction could not come as quickly in her case. But she turned on Bessy two eyes full of pardon, full of speechless pity...and Bessy received the look silently before she moved to the door and went out.

"Oh, poor thing--poor thing!" Justine gasped as the door closed.

She had already forgotten her own hurt--she was alone again with Bessy's sterile pain. She stood staring before her for a moment--then her eyes fell on Amherst's letter, which had fluttered to the floor between them. The fatal letter! If it had not come at that unlucky moment perhaps she might still have gained her end.... She picked it up and re-read it. Yes--there were phrases in it that a wounded suspicious heart might misconstrue.... Yet Bessy's last words had absolved her.... Why had she not answered them? Why had she stood there dumb? The blow to her pride had been too deep, had been dealt too