The Fruit of the Tree

  XL

  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 hisface, which was crossed by one of the waves of heat and tremulousnessthat she was beginning to fear for him. Mr. Langhope had changed greatlyin the last three months; and as he stood there in the clear light ofthe June afternoon it came to her that he had at last suffered thesudden 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 forthe letter.

  "Amherst writes to remind me of my promise to take Cicely to Hanafordnext week, for her birthday."

  "Well--it was a promise, wasn't it?" she rejoined, running her eyes overthe page.

  "A promise--yes; but made before.... Read the note--you'll see there'sno reference to his wife. For all I know, she'll be there to receiveus."

  "But that was a promise too."

  "That neither Cicely nor I should ever set eyes on her? Yes. But whyshould she keep it? I was a fool that day--she fooled me as she's fooledus all! But you saw through it from the beginning--you said at once thatshe'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 tobreak her side of the agreement."

  Mr. Langhope sank into a chair, steadying himself painfully with hisstick. "Upon my soul, I sometimes think you're on her side!" heejaculated.

  "No--but I like fair play," she returned, measuring his tea carefullyinto his favourite little porcelain tea-pot.

  "Fair play?"

  "She's offering to do her part. It's for you to do yours now--to takeCicely 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 theslender-legged table at his elbow; then, before returning to her seat,she found the enamelled match-box and laid it by the cup. It wasbecoming difficult for Mr. Langhope to guide his movements about hersmall encumbered room; and he had always liked being waited on.

  * * * * *

  Mrs. Ansell's prognostication proved correct. When Mr. Langhope andCicely arrived at Hanaford they found Amherst alone to receive them. Heexplained briefly that his wife had been unwell, and had gone to seekrest and change at the house of an old friend in the west. Mr. Langhopeexpressed a decent amount of regret, and the subject was dropped as ifby common consent. Cicely, however, was not so easily silenced. PoorBessy's uncertain fits of tenderness had produced more bewilderment thanpleasure in her sober-minded child; but the little girl's feelings andperceptions had developed rapidly in the equable atmosphere of herstep-mother's affection. Cicely had reached the age when children puttheir questions with as much ingenuity as persistence, and both Mr.Langhope and Amherst longed for Mrs. Ansell's aid in parrying herincessant interrogations as to the cause and length of Justine'sabsence, what she had said before going, and what promise she had madeabout coming back. But Mrs. Ansell had not come to Hanaford. Though ithad become a matter of habit to include her in the family pilgrimages tothe mills she had firmly maintained the plea of more urgent engagements;and the two men, with only Cicely between them, had spent the long daysand longer evenings in unaccustomed and unmitigated propinquity.

  Mr. Langhope, before leaving, thought it proper to touch tentatively onhis promise of giving Cicely to Amherst for the summer; but to hissurprise the latter, after a moment of hesitation, replied that heshould probably go to Europe for two or three months.

  "To Europe? Alone?" escaped from Mr. Langhope before he had time toweigh his words.

  Amherst frowned slightly. "I have been made a delegate to the Berneconference on the housing of factory operatives," he said at length,without making a direct reply to the question; "and if there is nothingto keep me at Westmore, I shall probably go out in July." He waited amoment, and then added: "My wife has decided to spend the summer inMichigan."

  Mr. Langhope's answer was a vague murmur of assent, and Amherst turnedthe talk to other matters.

  * * * * *

  Mr. Langhope returned to town with distinct views on the situation atHanaford.

  "Poor devil--I'm sorry for him: he can hardly speak of her," he brokeout at once to Mrs. Ansell, in the course of their first confidentialhour 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 believeyou're actually sorry!"

  "Sorry?" She raised her eye-brows with a slight smile. "Should one notalways be sorry to know there's a little less love and a little morehate 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 ourlives than when she was with us!"

  * * * * *

  Amherst went to the Berne conference in July, and spent six weeksafterward in rapid visits to various industrial centres and modelfactory villages. During his previous European pilgrimages his interesthad by no means been restricted to sociological questions: the appeal ofan old civilization, reaching him through its innumerable forms oftradition and beauty, had roused that side of his imagination which hiswork at home left untouched. But upon his present state of deep moralcommotion the spells of art and history were powerless to work. Thefoundations of his life had been shaken, and the fair exterior of theworld was as vacant as a maniac's face. He could only take refuge in hisspecial task, barricading himself against every expression of beauty andpoetry as so many poignant reminders of a phase of life that he wasvainly trying to cast off and forget.

  Even his work had been embittered to him, thrust out of its place in theordered scheme of things. It had cost him a hard struggle to hold fastto his main purpose, to convince himself that his real duty lay, not inrenouncing the Westmore money and its obligations, but in carrying outhis projected task as if nothing had occurred to affect his personalrelation to it. The mere fact that such a renunciation would have been adeliberate moral suicide, a severing once for all of every artery ofaction, made it take on, at first, the semblance of an obligation, asort 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 ofhis life, it was easier for him to return to a dispassionate view of hissituation, to see, and boldly confess to himself that he saw, the stillhigher duty of sticking to his task, instead of sacrificing it to anyideal of personal disinterestedness. It was this gradual process ofadjustment that saved him from the desolating scepticism which falls onthe active man when the sources of his activity are tainted. Havingaccepted his fate, having consented to see in himself merely thenecessary agent of a good to be done, he could escape fromself-questioning only by shutting himself up in the practical exigenciesof his work, closing his eyes and his thoughts to everything which hadformerly related it to a wider world, had given meaning and beauty tolife as a whole.

  The return from Europe, and the taking up of the daily routine atHanaford, were the most difficult phases in this process of moraladaptation.

  Justine's departure had at first brought relief. He had been too sincerewith himself to oppose her wish to leave Hanaford for a time, since hebelieved that, for her as well as for himself, a temporary separationwould be less painful than a continuance of their actual relation. Butas the weeks passed into months he found h
e was no nearer to a clearview of his own case: the future was still dark and enigmatic. Justine'sdesire to leave him had revived his unformulated distrust of her. Whatcould it mean but that there were thoughts within her which could not beat rest in his presence? He had given her every proof of his wish toforget the past, and Mr. Langhope had behaved with unequalledmagnanimity. Yet Justine's unhappiness was evident: she could notconceal her longing to escape from the conditions her act had created.Was it because, in reality, she was conscious of other motives than theone she acknowledged? She had insisted, almost unfeelingly as it mighthave seemed, on the abstract rightness of what she had done, on the factthat, ideally speaking, her act could not be made less right, lessjustifiable, by the special accidental consequences that had flowed fromit. Because these consequences had caught her in a web of tragicfatality she would not be guilty of the weakness of tracing back thedisaster to any intrinsic error in her original motive. Why, then, ifthis was her real, her proud attitude toward the past--and since thoseabout her believed in her sincerity, and accepted her justification asvalid from her point of view if not from theirs--why had she not beenable to maintain her posture, to carry on life on the terms she hadexacted from others?

  A special circumstance contributed to this feeling of distrust; thefact, 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 herreasons clearly and soberly, without evasion or ambiguity.

  "Since you and I," she wrote, "have always agreed in regarding theWestmore money as a kind of wage for our services at the mills, Icannot be satisfied to go on drawing that wage while I am unable to doany work in return. I am sure you must feel as I do about this; and youneed have no anxiety as to the practical side of the question, since Ihave enough to live on in some savings from my hospital days, which wereinvested for me two years ago by Harry Dressel, and are beginning tobring in a small return. This being the case, I feel I can afford tointerpret in any way I choose the terms of the bargain between myselfand Westmore."

  On reading this, Amherst's mind had gone through the strange dualprocess which now marked all his judgments of his wife. At first he hadfancied he understood her, and had felt that he should have done as shedid; then the usual reaction of distrust set in, and he asked himselfwhy she, who had so little of the conventional attitude toward money,should now develop this unexpected susceptibility. And so the oldquestion presented itself in another shape: if she had nothing toreproach herself for, why was it intolerable to her to live on Bessy'smoney? The fact that she was doing no actual service at Westmore did notaccount for her scruples--she would have been the last person to thinkthat a sick servant should be docked of his pay. Her reluctance couldcome only from that hidden cause of compunction which had prompted herdeparture, and which now forced her to sever even the merely materiallinks between herself and her past.

  Amherst, on his return to Hanaford, had tried to find in theseconsiderations a reason for his deep unrest. It was his wife's coursewhich still cast a torturing doubt on what he had braced his will toaccept and put behind him. And he now told himself that the perpetualgalling sense of her absence was due to this uneasy consciousness ofwhat 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 herat 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 whichgave meaning to the life he had chosen, yet never let him forget thatthere was a larger richer life outside, to which he was rooted by deeperand more intrinsic things than any abstract ideal of altruism. His lovehad preserved his identity, saved him from shrinking into the merenameless unit which the social enthusiast is in danger of becomingunless the humanitarian passion is balanced, and a little overweighed,by a merely human one. And now this equilibrium was lost forever, andhis deepest pain lay in realizing that he could not regain it, even bycasting off Westmore and choosing the narrower but richer individualexistence that her love might once have offered. His life was in truthone indivisible organism, not two halves artificially united. Self andother-self were ingrown from the roots--whichever portion faterestricted him to would be but a mutilated half-live fragment of thewhole.

  Happily for him, chance made this crisis of his life coincide with astrike at Westmore. Soon after his return to Hanaford he found himselfcompelled to grapple with the hardest problem of his industrial career,and he was carried through the ensuing three months on that tide ofswift obligatory action that sweeps the ship-wrecked spirit over so manysunken reefs of fear and despair. The knowledge that he was better ableto deal with the question than any one who might conceivably have takenhis place--this conviction, which was presently confirmed by thepeaceable adjustment of the strike, helped to make the sense of hisimmediate usefulness outbalance that other, disintegrating doubt as tothe final value of such efforts. And so he tried to settle down into akind of mechanical altruism, in which the reflexes of habit should takethe place of that daily renewal of faith and enthusiasm which had beenfed from the springs of his own joy.

  * * * * *

  The autumn came and passed into winter; and after Mr. Langhope'sre-establishment in town Amherst began to resume his usual visits to hisstep-daughter.

  His natural affection for the little girl had been deepened by theunforeseen manner in which her fate had been entrusted to him. Thethought of Bessy, softened to compunction by the discovery that her lovehad persisted under their apparently hopeless estrangement--thisfeeling, intensified to the verge of morbidness by the circumstancesattending her death, now sought expression in a passionate devotion toher child. Accident had, in short, created between Bessy and himself aretrospective sympathy which the resumption of life together would havedispelled in a week--one of the exhalations from the past that depressthe vitality of those who linger too near the grave of dead experiences.

  Since Justine's departure Amherst had felt himself still more drawn toCicely; but his relation to the child was complicated by the fact thatshe 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; andher memory had the precocious persistence sometimes developed inchildren too early deprived of their natural atmosphere of affection.Cicely had always been petted and adored, at odd times and by diverspeople; but some instinct seemed to tell her that, of all the tendernessbestowed on her, Justine's most resembled the all-pervading motherlyelement in which the child's heart expands without ever being consciousof its needs.

  If it had been embarrassing to evade Cicely's questions in June itbecame doubly so as the months passed, and the pretext of Justine'sill-health grew more and more difficult to sustain. And in the followingMarch Amherst was suddenly called from Hanaford by the news that thelittle girl herself was ill. Serious complications had developed from aprotracted case of scarlet fever, and for two weeks the child's fate wasuncertain. Then she began to recover, and in the joy of seeing life comeback to her, Mr. Langhope and Amherst felt as though they must not onlygratify every wish she expressed, but try to guess at those they sawfloating below the surface of her clear vague eyes.

  It was noticeable to Mrs. Ansell, if not to the others, that one ofthese unexpressed wishes was the desire to see her stepmother. Cicely nolonger asked for Justine; but something in her silence, or in thegesture with which she gently put from her other offers of diversion andcompanionship, suddenly struck Mrs. Ansell as more poignant than speech.

  "What is it the child wants?" she asked the governess, in the course ofone of their whispered consultations; and the governess, after amoment's hesitation, replied: "She said something about a letter shewrote to Mrs. Amherst just before she was taken ill--about having had noanswer, 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 compositionsshould take the form of letters--it usually interests a child more--andshe 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: "Ofcourse--of course----" she added haughtily: "I trust the letters weresent?"

  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 muchexcitement 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 sheis unusually reserved for her age."

  The medical man took his departure, and Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansellfaced each other in the disarray produced by a call to arms when allhas seemed at peace.

  "I shall lose her--I shall lose her!" the grandfather broke out, sinkinginto his chair with a groan.

  Mrs. Ansell, gathering up her furs for departure, turned on him abruptlyfrom the threshold.

  "It's stupid, what you're doing--stupid!" she exclaimed with unwontedvehemence.

  He raised his head with a startled look. "What do you mean--what I'mdoing?"

  "The child misses Justine. You ought to send for her."

  Mr. Langhope's hands dropped to the arms of his chair, and hestraightened himself up with a pale flash of indignation. "You've hadmoments 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 herfast...and in those moments I saw...saw what she wanted...and so didyou!"

  Mr. Langhope turned away his head. "You're a sentimentalist!" he flungscornfully 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 movementsthat 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 himagain.

  "Ah----" He shifted his position, one elbow supporting his bowed head,his eyes fixed on the ground. Presently he brought out: "Could one askher 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 thesame reason?"

  "No--no--I see." He paused, and then looked up at her suddenly. "Butwhat 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--whatpossible difference would that make?"

  Mrs. Ansell, from the doorway, shed a pitying glance on him. "Ah--if youdon't see!" she murmured.

  He sank back into his seat with a groan. "Good heavens, Maria, how youtorture me! I see enough as it is--I see too much of the cursedbusiness!"

  She paused again, and then slowly moved a step or two nearer, laying herhand on his shoulder.

  "There's one thing you've never seen yet, Henry: what Bessy herselfwould do now--for the child--if she could."

  He sat motionless under her light touch, his eyes on hers, till theirinmost thoughts felt for and found each other, as they still sometimescould, through the fog of years and selfishness and worldly habit; thenhe dropped his face into his hands, hiding it from her with theinstinctive shrinking of an aged grief.