IfMr. Langhope had ever stooped to such facile triumphs as that summed up in the convenient "I told you so," he would have loosed the phrase on Mrs. Ansell in the course of a colloquy which these two, the next afternoon, were at some pains to defend from the incursions of the Lynbrook house-party.
Mrs. Ansell was the kind of woman who could encircle herself with privacy on an excursion-boat and create a nook in an hotel drawing-room, but it taxed even her ingenuity to segregate herself from the Telfers. When the feat was accomplished, and it became evident that Mr. Langhope could yield himself securely to the joys of confidential discourse, he paused on the brink of disclosure to say: "It's as well I saved that Ming from the ruins."
"What ruins?" she exclaimed, her startled look giving him the full benefit of the effect he was seeking to produce.
He addressed himself deliberately to the selecting and lighting of a cigarette. "Truscomb is down and out—resigned, 'the wise it call.' And the alterationsat Westmore are going to cost a great deal more than my experienced son-in-law expected. This is Westy's morning budget—he and Amherst had it out last night. I tell my poor girl that at least she'll lose nothing when thebibelotsI've bought for her go up the spout."
Mrs. Ansell received this with a troubled countenance. "What has become of Bessy? I've not seen her since luncheon."
"No. She and Blanche Carbury have motored over to dine with the Nick Ledgers at Islip."
"Did you see her before she left?"
"For a moment, but she said very little. Westy tells me that Amherst hints at leasing the New York house. One can understand that she's left speechless."
Mrs. Ansell, at this, sat bolt upright. "The New York house?" But she broke off to add, with seeming irrelevance: "If you knew how I detest Blanche Carbury!"
Mr. Langhope made a gesture of semi-acquiescence. "She is not the friend I should have chosen for Bessy—but we know that Providence makes use of strange instruments."
"Providence and Blanche Carbury?" She stared at him. "Ah, you are profoundly corrupt!"
"I have the coarse masculine habit of looking facts in the face. Woman-like, you prefer to make use of them privately, and cut them when you meet in public."
"Blanche is not the kind of fact I should care to make use of under any circumstances whatever!"
"No one asks you to. Simply regard her as a force of nature—let her alone, and don't put up too many lightning-rods."
She raised her eyes to his face. "Do you really mean that you want Bessy to get a divorce?"
"Your style is elliptical, dear Maria; but divorce does not frighten me very much. It has grown almost as painless as modern dentistry."
"It's our odious insensibility that makes it so!"
Mr. Langhope received this with the mildness of suspended judgment. "How else, then, do you propose that Bessy shall save what is left of her money?"
"I would rather see her save what is left of her happiness. Bessy will never be happy in the new way."
"What do you call the new way?"
"Launching one's boat over a human body—or several, as the case may be!"
"But don't you see that, as an expedient to bring this madman to reason——"
"I've told you that you don't understand him!"
Mr. Langhope turned on her with what would have been a show of temper in any one less provided with shades of manner. "Well, then, explain him, for God's sake!"
"I might explain him by saying that she's still in love with him."
"Ah, if you're still imprisoned in the old formulas!"
Mrs. Ansell confronted him with a grave face. "Isn't that precisely what Bessy is? Isn't she one of the most harrowing victims of the plan of bringing up our girls in the double bondage of expediency and unreality, corrupting their bodies with luxury and their brains with sentiment, and leaving them to reconcile the two as best they can, or lose their souls in the attempt?"
Mr. Langhope smiled. "I may observe that, with my poor child so early left alone to me, I supposed I was doing my best in committing her guidance to some of the most admirable women I know."
"Of whom I was one—and not the least lamentable example of the system! Of course the only thing that saves us from their vengeance," Mrs. Ansell added, "is that so few of them ever stop to think...."
"And yet, as I make out, it's precisely what you would have Bessy do!"
"It's what neither you nor I can help her doing. You've given her just acuteness enough to question, without consecutiveness enough to explain. But if she must perish in the struggle—and I see no hope for her—" cried Mrs. Ansell, starting suddenly and dramatically to her feet, "at least let her perish defending her ideals and not denying them—even if she has tosell the New York house and all your china pots into the bargain!"
Mr. Langhope, rising also, deprecatingly lifted his hands, "If that's what you call saving me from her vengeance—sending the crockery crashing round my ears!" And, as she turned away without any pretense of capping his pleasantry, he added, with a gleam of friendly malice: "I suppose you're going to the Hunt ball as Cassandra?"
Amherst, that morning, had sought out his wife with the definite resolve to efface the unhappy impression of their previous talk. He blamed himself for having been too easily repelled by her impatience. As the stronger of the two, with the power of a fixed purpose to sustain him, he should have allowed for the instability of her impulses, and above all for the automatic influences of habit.
Knowing that she did not keep early hours he delayed till ten o'clock to present himself at her sitting-room door, but the maid who answered his knock informed him that Mrs. Amherst was not yet up.
His reply that he would wait did not appear to hasten the leisurely process of her toilet, and he had the room to himself for a full half-hour. Many months had passed since he had spent so long a time in it, and though habitually unobservant of external details, he now found an outlet for his restlessness in mechanicallynoting the intimate appurtenances of Bessy's life. He was at first merely conscious of a soothing harmony of line and colour, extending from the blurred tints of the rug to the subdued gleam of light on old picture-frames and on the slender flanks of porcelain vases; but gradually he began to notice how every chair and screen and cushion, and even every trifling utensil on the inlaid writing-desk, had been chosen with reference to the whole composition, and to the minutest requirements of a fastidious leisure. A few months ago this studied setting, if he had thought of it at all, would have justified itself as expressing the pretty woman's natural affinity with pretty toys; but now it was the cost of it that struck him. He was beginning to learn from Bessy's bills that no commodity is taxed as high as beauty, and the beauty about him filled him with sudden repugnance, as the disguise of the evil influences that were separating his wife's life from his.
But with her entrance he dismissed the thought, and tried to meet her as if nothing stood in the way of their full communion. Her hair, still wet from the bath, broke from its dryad-like knot in dusky rings and spirals threaded with gold, and from her loose flexible draperies, and her whole person as she moved, there came a scent of youth and morning freshness. Her beauty touched him, and made it easier for him to humble himself.
"I was stupid and disagreeable last night. I can never say what I want when I have to count the minutes, and I've come back now for a quiet talk," he began.
A shade of distrust passed over Bessy's face. "About business?" she asked, pausing a few feet away from him.
"Don't let us give it that name!" He went up to her and drew her two hands into his. "You used to call it our work—won't you go back to that way of looking at it?"
Her hands resisted his pressure. "I didn't know, then, that it was going to be the only thing you cared for——"
But for her own sake he would not let her go on. "Some day I shall make you see how much my caring for it means my caring for you. But meanwhile," he urged, "won't you overcome your aversion to the subject, and bear with it as my work, if you no longer care to think of it as yours?"
Bessy, freeing herself, sat down on the edge of the straight-backed chair near the desk, as though to mark the parenthetical nature of the interview.
"I know you think me stupid—but wives are not usually expected to go into all the details of their husband's business. I have told you to do whatever you wish at Westmore, and I can't see why that is not enough."
Amherst looked at her in surprise. Something in her quick mechanical utterance suggested that not only the thought but the actual words she spoke had been inspired, and he fancied he heard in them an echo of Blanche Carbury's tones. Though Bessy's intimacy with Mrs. Carbury was of such recent date, fragments of unheeded smoking-room gossip now recurred to confirm the vague antipathy which Amherst had felt for her the previous evening.
"I know that, among your friends, wives are not expected to interest themselves in their husbands' work, and if the mills were mine I should try to conform to the custom, though I should always think it a pity that the questions that fill a man's thoughts should be ruled out of his talk with his wife; but as it is, I am only your representative at Westmore, and I don't see how we can help having the subject come up between us."
Bessy remained silent, not as if acquiescing in his plea, but as though her own small stock of arguments had temporarily failed her; and he went on, enlarging on his theme with a careful avoidance of technical terms, and with the constant effort to keep the human and personal side of the question before her.
She listened without comment, her eyes fixed on a little jewelled letter-opener which she had picked up from the writing-table, and which she continued to turn in her fingers while he spoke.
The full development of Amherst's plans at Westmore, besides resulting, as he had foreseen, in Truscomb's resignation, and in Halford Gaines's outspoken resistance to the new policy, had necessitated a larger immediate outlay of capital than the first estimates demanded, and Amherst, in putting his case to Bessy, was prepared to have her meet it on the old ground of the disapproval of all her advisers. But when he had ended she merely said, without looking up from the toy in her hand: "I always expected that you would need a great deal more money than you thought."
The comment touched him at his most vulnerable point. "But you see why? You understand how the work has gone on growing—?"
His wife lifted her head to glance at him for a moment. "I am not sure that I understand," she said indifferently; "but if another loan is necessary, of course I will sign the note for it."
The words checked his reply by bringing up, before he was prepared to deal with it, the other and more embarrassing aspect of the question. He had hoped to reawaken in Bessy some feeling for the urgency of his task before having to take up the subject of its cost; but her cold anticipation of his demands as part of a disagreeable business to be despatched and put out of mind, doubled the difficulty of what he had leftto say; and it occurred to him that she had perhaps foreseen and reckoned on this result.
He met her eyes gravely. "Another loanisnecessary; but if any proper provision is to be made for paying it back, your expenses will have to be cut down a good deal for the next few months."
The blood leapt to Bessy's face. "My expenses? You seem to forget how much I've had to cut them down already."
"The household bills certainly don't show it. They are increasing steadily, and there have been some very heavy incidental payments lately."
"What do you mean by incidental payments?"
"Well, there was the pair of cobs you bought last month——"
She returned to a resigned contemplation of the letter-opener. "With only one motor, one must have more horses, of course."
"The stables seemed to me fairly full before. But if you required more horses, I don't see why, at this particular moment, it was also necessary to buy a set of Chinese vases for twenty-five hundred dollars."
Bessy, at this, lifted her head with an air of decision that surprised him. Her blush had faded as quickly as it came, and he noticed that she was pale to the lips.
"I know you don't care about such things; but I had an exceptional chance of securing the vases at alow price—they are really worth twice as much—and Dick always wanted a set of Ming for the drawing-room mantelpiece."
Richard Westmore's name was always tacitly avoided between them, for in Amherst's case the disagreeable sense of dependence on a dead man's bounty increased that feeling of obscure constraint and repugnance which any reminder of the first husband's existence is wont to produce in his successor.
He reddened at the reply, and Bessy, profiting by an embarrassment which she had perhaps consciously provoked, went on hastily, and as if by rote: "I have left you perfectly free to do as you think best at the mills, but this perpetual discussion of my personal expenses is very unpleasant to me, as I am sure it must be to you, and in future I think it would be much better for us to have separate accounts."
"Separate accounts?" Amherst echoed in genuine astonishment.
"I should like my personal expenses to be under my own control again—I have never been used to accounting for every penny I spend."
The vertical lines deepened between Amherst's brows. "You are of course free to spend your money as you like—and I thought you were doing so when you authorized me, last spring, to begin the changes at Westmore."
Her lip trembled. "Do you reproach me for that? I didn't understand...you took advantage...."
"Oh!" he exclaimed.
At his tone the blood rushed back to her face. "It was my fault, of course—I only wanted to please you——"
Amherst was silent, confronted by the sudden sense of his own responsibility. What she said was true—he had known, when he exacted the sacrifice, that she made it only to please him, on an impulse of reawakened feeling, and not from any real recognition of a larger duty. The perception of this made him answer gently: "I am willing to take any blame you think I deserve; but it won't help us now to go back to the past. It is more important that we should come to an understanding about the future. If by keeping your personal account separate, you mean that you wish to resume control of your whole income, then you ought to understand that the improvements at the mills will have to be dropped at once, and things there go back to their old state."
She started up with an impatient gesture. "Oh, I should like never to hear of the mills again!"
He looked at her a moment in silence. "Am I to take that as your answer?"
She walked toward her door without returning his look. "Of course," she murmured, "you will end by doing as you please."
The retort moved him, for he heard in it the cry of her wounded pride. He longed to be able to cry out in return that Westmore was nothing to him, that all he asked was to see her happy.... But it was not true, and his manhood revolted from the deception. Besides, its effect would be only temporary—would wear no better than her vain efforts to simulate an interest in his work. Between them, forever, were the insurmountable barriers of character, of education, of habit—and yet it was not in him to believe that any barrier was insurmountable.
"Bessy," he exclaimed, following her, "don't let us part in this way——"
She paused with her hand on her dressing-room door. "It is time to dress for church," she objected, turning to glance at the little gilt clock on the chimney-piece.
"For church?" Amherst stared, wondering that at such a crisis she should have remained detached enough to take note of the hour.
"You forget," she replied, with an air of gentle reproof, "that before we married I was in the habit of going to church every Sunday."
"Yes—to be sure. Would you not like me to go with you?" he rejoined gently, as if roused to the consciousness of another omission in the long list of his social shortcomings; for church-going, at Lynbrook, had always struck him as a purely social observance.
But Bessy had opened the door of her dressing-room. "I much prefer that you should do what you like," she said as she passed from the room.
Amherst made no farther attempt to detain her, and the door closed on her as though it were closing on a chapter in their lives.
"That's the end of it!" he murmured, picking up the letter-opener she had been playing with, and twirling it absently in his fingers. But nothing in life ever ends, and the next moment a new question confronted him—how was the next chapter to open?
Itwas late in October when Amherst returned to Lynbrook.
He had begun to learn, in the interval, the lesson most difficult to his direct and trenchant nature: that compromise is the law of married life. On the afternoon of his talk with his wife he had sought her out, determined to make a final effort to clear up the situation between them; but he learned that, immediately after luncheon, she had gone off in the motor with Mrs. Carbury and two men of the party, leaving word that they would probably not be back till evening. It cost Amherst a struggle, when he had humbled himself to receive this information from the butler, not to pack his portmanteau and take the first train for Hanaford; but he was still under the influence of Justine Brent's words, and also of his own feeling that, at this juncture, a break between himself and Bessy would be final.
He stayed on accordingly, enduring as best he might the mute observation of the household, and the gentle irony of Mr. Langhope's attentions; and before he left Lynbrook, two days later, a provisional understanding had been reached.
His wife proved more firm than he had foreseen in her resolve to regain control of her income, and the talk between them ended in reciprocal concessions, Bessy consenting to let the town house for the winter and remain at Lynbrook, while Amherst agreed to restrict his improvements at Westmore to such alterations as had already been begun, and to reduce the expenditure on these as much as possible. It was virtually the defeat of his policy, and he had to suffer the decent triumph of the Gaineses, as well as the bitterer pang of his foiled aspirations. In spite of the opposition of the directors, he had taken advantage of Truscomb's resignation to put Duplain at the head of the mills; but the new manager's outspoken disgust at the company's change of plan made it clear that he would not remain long at Westmore, and it was one of the miseries of Amherst's situation that he could not give the reasons for his defection, but must bear to figure in Duplain's terse vocabulary as a "quitter." The difficulty of finding a new manager expert enough to satisfy the directors, yet in sympathy with his own social theories, made Amherst fear that Duplain's withdrawal would open the way for Truscomb's reinstatement, an outcome on which he suspected Halford Gaines had always counted; and this possibility loomed before him as the final defeat of his hopes.
Meanwhile the issues ahead had at least the merit ofkeeping him busy. The task of modifying and retrenching his plans contrasted drearily with the hopeful activity of the past months, but he had an iron capacity for hard work under adverse conditions, and the fact of being too busy for thought helped him to wear through the days. This pressure of work relieved him, at first, from too close consideration of his relation to Bessy. He had yielded up his dearest hopes at her wish, and for the moment his renunciation had set a chasm between them; but gradually he saw that, as he was patching together the ruins of his Westmore plans, so he must presently apply himself to the reconstruction of his married life.
Before leaving Lynbrook he had had a last word with Miss Brent; not a word of confidence—for the same sense of reserve kept both from any explicit renewal of their moment's intimacy—but one of those exchanges of commonplace phrase that circumstances may be left to charge with special meaning. Justine had merely asked if he were really leaving and, on his assenting, had exclaimed quickly: "But you will come back soon?"
"I shall certainly come back," he answered; and after a pause he added: "I shall find you here? You will remain at Lynbrook?"
On her part also there was a shade of hesitation; then she said with a smile: "Yes, I shall stay."
His look brightened. "And you'll write me if anything—if Bessy should not be well?"
"I will write you," she promised; and a few weeks after his return to Hanaford he had, in fact, received a short note from her. Its ostensible purpose was to reassure him as to Bessy's health, which had certainly grown stronger since Dr. Wyant had persuaded her, at the close of the last house-party, to accord herself a period of quiet; but (the writer added) now that Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell had also left, the quiet was perhaps too complete, and Bessy's nerves were beginning to suffer from the reaction.
Amherst had no difficulty in interpreting this brief communication. "I have succeeded in dispersing the people who are always keeping you and your wife apart; now is your chance: come and take it." That was what Miss Brent's letter meant; and his answer was a telegram to Bessy, announcing his return to Long Island.
The step was not an easy one; but decisive action, however hard, was always easier to Amherst than the ensuing interval of readjustment. To come to Lynbrook had required a strong effort of will; but the effort of remaining there called into play less disciplined faculties.
Amherst had always been used to doing things; now he had to resign himself to enduring a state of things.The material facilities of the life about him, the way in which the machinery of the great empty house ran on like some complex apparatus working in the void, increased the exasperation of his nerves. Dr. Wyant's suggestion—which Amherst suspected Justine of having prompted—that Mrs. Amherst should cancel her autumn engagements, and give herself up to a quiet outdoor life with her husband, seemed to present the very opportunity these two distracted spirits needed to find and repossess each other. But, though Amherst was grateful to Bessy for having dismissed her visitors—partly to please him, as he guessed—yet he found the routine of the establishment more oppressive than when the house was full. If he could have been alone with her in a quiet corner—the despised cottage at Westmore, even!—he fancied they might still have been brought together by restricted space and the familiar exigencies of life. All the primitive necessities which bind together, through their recurring daily wants, natures fated to find no higher point of union, had been carefully eliminated from the life at Lynbrook, where material needs were not only provided for but anticipated by a hidden mechanism that filled the house with the perpetual sense of invisible attendance. Though Amherst knew that he and Bessy could never meet in the region of great issues, he thought he might have regained the way to her heart, and found relief fromhis own inaction, in the small ministrations of daily life; but the next moment he smiled to picture Bessy in surroundings where the clocks were not wound of themselves and the doors did not fly open at her approach. Those thick-crowding cares and drudgeries which serve as merciful screens between so many discordant natures would have been as intolerable to her as was to Amherst the great glare of leisure in which he and she were now confronted.
He saw that Bessy was in the state of propitiatory eagerness which always followed on her gaining a point in their long duel; and he could guess that she was tremulously anxious not only to make up to him, by all the arts she knew, for the sacrifice she had exacted, but also to conceal from every one the fact that, as Mr. Langhope bluntly put it, he had been "brought to terms." Amherst was touched by her efforts, and half-ashamed of his own inability to respond to them. But his mind, released from its normal preoccupations, had become a dangerous instrument of analysis and disintegration, and conditions which, a few months before, he might have accepted with the wholesome tolerance of the busy man, now pressed on him unendurably. He saw that he and his wife were really face to face for the first time since their marriage. Hitherto something had always intervened between them—first the spell of her grace and beauty, and thebrief joy of her participation in his work; then the sorrow of their child's death, and after that the temporary exhilaration of carrying out his ideas at Westmore—but now that the last of these veils had been torn away they faced each other as strangers.
The habit of keeping factory hours always drove Amherst forth long before his wife's day began, and in the course of one of his early tramps he met Miss Brent and Cicely setting out for a distant swamp where rumour had it that a rare native orchid might be found. Justine's sylvan tastes had developed in the little girl a passion for such pillaging expeditions, and Cicely, who had discovered that her step-father knew almost as much about birds and squirrels as Miss Brent did about flowers, was not to be appeased till Amherst had scrambled into the pony-cart, wedging his long legs between a fern-box and a lunch-basket, and balancing a Scotch terrier's telescopic body across his knees.
The season was so mild that only one or two light windless frosts had singed the foliage of oaks and beeches, and gilded the roadsides with a smooth carpeting of maple leaves. The morning haze rose like smoke from burnt-out pyres of sumach and sugar-maple; a silver bloom lay on the furrows of the ploughed fields; and now and then, as they drove on, the woodedroad showed at its end a tarnished disk of light, where sea and sky were merged.
At length they left the road for a winding track through scrub-oaks and glossy thickets of mountain-laurel; the track died out at the foot of a wooded knoll, and clambering along its base they came upon the swamp. There it lay in charmed solitude, shut in by a tawny growth of larch and swamp-maple, its edges burnt out to smouldering shades of russet, ember-red and ashen-grey, while the quaking centre still preserved a jewel-like green, where hidden lanes of moisture wound between islets tufted with swamp-cranberry and with the charred browns of fern and wild rose and bay. Sodden earth and decaying branches gave forth a strange sweet odour, as of the aromatic essences embalming a dead summer; and the air charged with this scent was so still that the snapping of witch-hazel pods, the drop of a nut, the leap of a startled frog, pricked the silence with separate points of sound.
The pony made fast, the terrier released, and fern-box and lunch-basket slung over Amherst's shoulder, the three explorers set forth on their journey. Amherst, as became his sex, went first; but after a few absent-minded plunges into the sedgy depths between the islets, he was ordered to relinquish his command and fall to the rear, where he might perform the humbler service of occasionally lifting Cicely over unspannable gulfs of moisture.
Justine, leading the way, guided them across the treacherous surface as fearlessly as a king-fisher, lighting instinctively on every grass-tussock and submerged tree-stump of the uncertain path. Now and then she paused, her feet drawn close on their narrow perch, and her slender body swaying over as she reached down for some rare growth detected among the withered reeds and grasses; then she would right herself again by a backward movement as natural as the upward spring of a branch—so free and flexible in all her motions that she seemed akin to the swaying reeds and curving brambles which caught at her as she passed.
At length the explorers reached the mossy corner where the orchids grew, and Cicely, securely balanced on a fallen tree-trunk, was allowed to dig the coveted roots. When they had been packed away, it was felt that this culminating moment must be celebrated with immediate libations of jam and milk; and having climbed to a dry slope among the pepper-bushes, the party fell on the contents of the lunch-basket. It was just the hour when Bessy's maid was carrying her breakfast-tray, with its delicate service of old silver and porcelain, into the darkened bed-room at Lynbrook; but early rising and hard scrambling had whetted the appetites of the naturalists, and the nursery fare which Cicely spread before them seemed a sumptuous reward for their toil.
"I do like this kind of picnic much better than the ones where mother takes all the footmen, and the mayonnaise has to be scraped off things before I can eat them," Cicely declared, lifting her foaming mouth from a beaker of milk.
Amherst, lighting his pipe, stretched himself contentedly among the pepper-bushes, steeped in that unreflecting peace which is shed into some hearts by communion with trees and sky. He too was glad to get away from the footmen and the mayonnaise, and he imagined that his stepdaughter's exclamation summed up all the reasons for his happiness. The boyish wood-craft which he had cultivated in order to encourage the same taste in his factory lads came to life in this sudden return to nature, and he redeemed his clumsiness in crossing the swamp by spying a marsh-wren's nest that had escaped Justine, and detecting in a swiftly-flitting olive-brown bird a belated tanager in autumn incognito.
Cicely sat rapt while he pictured the bird's winter pilgrimage, with glimpses of the seas and islands that fled beneath him till his long southern flight ended in the dim glades of the equatorial forests.
"Oh, what a good life—how I should like to be a wander-bird, and look down people's chimneys twicea year!" Justine laughed, tilting her head back to catch a last glimpse of the tanager.
The sun beamed full on their ledge from a sky of misty blue, and she had thrown aside her hat, uncovering her thick waves of hair, blue-black in the hollows, with warm rusty edges where they took the light. Cicely dragged down a plumy spray of traveller's joy and wound it above her friend's forehead; and thus wreathed, with her bright pallour relieved against the dusky autumn tints, Justine looked like a wood-spirit who had absorbed into herself the last golden juices of the year.
She leaned back laughing against a tree-trunk, pelting Cicely with witch-hazel pods, making the terrier waltz for scraps of ginger-bread, and breaking off now and then to imitate, with her clear full notes, the call of some hidden marsh-bird, or the scolding chatter of a squirrel in the scrub-oaks.
"Is that what you'd like most about the journey—looking down the chimneys?" Amherst asked with a smile.
"Oh, I don't know—I should love it all! Think of the joy of skimming over half the earth—seeing it born again out of darkness every morning! Sometimes, when I've been up all night with a patient, and have seen the worldcome back to melike that, I've been almost mad with its beauty; and then the thought thatI've never seen more than a little corner of it makes me feel as if I were chained. But I think if I had wings I should choose to be a house-swallow; and then, after I'd had my fill of wonders, I should come back to my familiar corner, and my house full of busy humdrum people, and fly low to warn them of rain, and wheel up high to show them it was good haying weather, and know what was going on in every room in the house, and every house in the village; and all the while I should be hugging my wonderful big secret—the secret of snow-plains and burning deserts, and coral islands and buried cities—and should put it all into my chatter under the eaves, that the people in the house were always too busy to stop and listen to—and when winter came I'm sure I should hate to leave them, even to go back to my great Brazilian forests full of orchids and monkeys!"
"But, Justine, in winter you could take care of the monkeys," the practical Cicely suggested.
"Yes—and that would remind me of home!" Justine cried, swinging about to pinch the little girl's chin.
She was in one of the buoyant moods when the spirit of life caught her in its grip, and shook and tossed her on its mighty waves as a sea-bird is tossed through the spray of flying rollers. At such moments all the light and music of the world seemed distilled into her veins, and forced up in bubbles of laughter to her lips andeyes. Amherst had never seen her thus, and he watched her with the sense of relaxation which the contact of limpid gaiety brings to a mind obscured by failure and self-distrust. The world was not so dark a place after all, if such springs of merriment could well up in a heart as sensitive as hers to the burden and toil of existence.
"Isn't it strange," she went on with a sudden drop to gravity, "that the bird whose wings carry him farthest and show him the most wonderful things, is the one who always comes back to the eaves, and is happiest in the thick of everyday life?"
Her eyes met Amherst's. "It seems to me," he said, "that you're like that yourself—loving long flights, yet happiest in the thick of life."
She raised her dark brows laughingly. "So I imagine—but then you see I've never had the long flight!"
Amherst smiled. "Ah, there it is—one never knows—one never says,This is the moment! because, however good it is, it always seems the door to a better one beyond. Faust never said it till the end, when he'd nothing left of all he began by thinking worth while; and then, with what a difference it was said!"
She pondered. "Yes—but itwasthe best, after all—the moment in which he had nothing left...."
"Oh," Cicely broke in suddenly, "do look at thesquirrel up there! See, father—he's off! Let's follow him!"
As she crouched there, with head thrown back, and sparkling lips and eyes, her fair hair—of her mother's very hue—making a shining haze about her face, Amherst recalled the winter evening at Hopewood, when he and Bessy had tracked the grey squirrel under the snowy beeches. Scarcely three years ago—and how bitter memory had turned! A chilly cloud spread over his spirit, reducing everything once more to the leaden hue of reality....
"It's too late for any more adventures—we must be going," he said.
Amherst'smorning excursions with his step-daughter and Miss Brent renewed themselves more than once. He welcomed any pretext for escaping from the unprofitable round of his thoughts, and these woodland explorations, with their gay rivalry of search for some rare plant or elusive bird, and the contact with the child's happy wonder, and with the morning brightness of Justine's mood, gave him his only moments of self-forgetfulness.
But the first time that Cicely's chatter carried home an echo of their adventures, Amherst saw a cloud on his wife's face. Her resentment of Justine's influenceover the child had long since subsided, and in the temporary absence of the governess she was glad to have Cicely amused; but she was never quite satisfied that those about her should have pursuits and diversions in which she did not share. Her jealousy did not concentrate itself on her husband and Miss Brent: Amherst had never shown any inclination for the society of other women, and if the possibility had been suggested to her, she would probably have said that Justine was not "in his style"—so unconscious is a pretty woman apt to be of the versatility of masculine tastes. But Amherst saw that she felt herself excluded from amusements in which she had no desire to join, and of which she consequently failed to see the purpose; and he gave up accompanying his stepdaughter.
Bessy, as if in acknowledgment of his renunciation, rose earlier in order to prolong their rides together. Dr. Wyant had counselled her against the fatigue of following the hounds, and she instinctively turned their horses away from the course the hunt was likely to take; but now and then the cry of the pack, or the flash of red on a distant slope, sent the blood to her face and made her press her mare to a gallop. When they escaped such encounters she showed no great zest in the exercise, and their rides resolved themselves into a spiritless middle-aged jog along the autumn lanes.In the early days of their marriage the joy of a canter side by side had merged them in a community of sensation beyond need of speech; but now that the physical spell had passed they felt the burden of a silence that neither knew how to break.
Once only, a moment's friction galvanized these lifeless rides. It was one morning when Bessy's wild mare Impulse, under-exercised and over-fed, suddenly broke from her control, and would have unseated her but for Amherst's grasp on the bridle.
"The horse is not fit for you to ride," he exclaimed, as the hot creature, with shudders of defiance rippling her flanks, lapsed into sullen subjection.
"It's only because I don't ride her enough," Bessy panted. "That new groom is ruining her mouth."
"You must not ride her alone, then."
"I shall not let that man ride her."
"I say you must not ride her alone."
"It's ridiculous to have a groom at one's heels!"
"Nevertheless you must, if you ride Impulse."
Their eyes met, and she quivered and yielded like the horse. "Oh, if you say so—" She always hugged his brief flashes of authority.
"I do say so. You promise me?"
"If you like——"
Amherst had made an attempt to occupy himself withthe condition of Lynbrook, one of those slovenly villages, without individual character or the tradition of self-respect, which spring up in America on the skirts of the rich summer colonies. But Bessy had never given Lynbrook a thought, and he realized the futility of hoping to interest her in its mongrel population of day-labourers and publicans so soon after his glaring failure at Westmore. The sight of the village irritated him whenever he passed through the Lynbrook gates, but having perforce accepted the situation of prince consort, without voice in the government, he tried to put himself out of relation with all the questions which had hitherto engrossed him, and to see life simply as a spectator. He could even conceive that, under certain conditions, there might be compensations in the passive attitude; but unfortunately these conditions were not such as the life at Lynbrook presented.
The temporary cessation of Bessy's week-end parties had naturally not closed her doors to occasional visitors, and glimpses of the autumnal animation of Long Island passed now and then across the Amhersts' horizon. Blanche Carbury had installed herself at Mapleside, a fashionable colony half-way between Lynbrook and Clifton, and even Amherst, unused as he was to noting the seemingly inconsecutive movements of idle people, could not but remark that her visits to his wife almost invariably coincided with Ned Bowfort's cantering overunannounced from the Hunt Club, where he had taken up his autumn quarters.
There was something very likeable about Bowfort, to whom Amherst was attracted by the fact that he was one of the few men of Bessy's circle who knew what was going on in the outer world. Throughout an existence which one divined to have been both dependent and desultory, he had preserved a sense of wider relations and acquired a smattering of information to which he applied his only independent faculty, that of clear thought. He could talk intelligently and not too inaccurately of the larger questions which Lynbrook ignored, and a gay indifference to the importance of money seemed the crowning grace of his nature, till Amherst suddenly learned that this attitude of detachment was generally ascribed to the liberality of Mrs. Fenton Carbury. "Everybody knows she married Fenton to provide for Ned," some one let fall in the course of one of the smoking-room dissertations on which the host of Lynbrook had such difficulty in fixing his attention; and the speaker's matter-of-course tone, and the careless acquiescence of his hearers, were more offensive to Amherst than the fact itself. In the first flush of his disgust he classed the story as one of the lies bred in the malarious air of after-dinner gossip; but gradually he saw that, whether true or not, it had sufficient circulation to cast a shade of ambiguity on the personsconcerned. Bessy alone seemed deaf to the rumours about her friend. There was something captivating to her in Mrs. Carbury's slang and noise, in her defiance of decorum and contempt of criticism. "I like Blanche because she doesn't pretend," was Bessy's vague justification of the lady; but in reality she was under the mysterious spell which such natures cast over the less venturesome imaginations of their own sex.
Amherst at first tried to deaden himself to the situation, as part of the larger coil of miseries in which he found himself; but all his traditions were against such tolerance, and they were roused to revolt by the receipt of a newspaper clipping, sent by an anonymous hand, enlarging on the fact that the clandestine meetings of a fashionable couple were being facilitated by the connivance of a Long Islandchâtelaine. Amherst, hot from the perusal of this paragraph, sprang into the first train, and laid the clipping before his father-in-law, who chanced to be passing through town on his way from the Hudson to the Hot Springs.
Mr. Langhope, ensconced in the cushioned privacy of the reading-room at the Amsterdam Club, where he had invited his son-in-law to meet him, perused the article with the cool eye of the collector to whom a new curiosity is offered.
"I suppose," he mused, "that in the time of thePharaohs the Morning Papyrus used to serve up this kind of thing"—and then, as the nervous tension of his hearer expressed itself in an abrupt movement, he added, handing back the clipping with a smile: "What do you propose to do? Kill the editor, and forbid Blanche and Bowfort the house?"
"I mean to do something," Amherst began, suddenly chilled by the realization that his wrath had not yet shaped itself into a definite plan of action.
"Well, it must be that or nothing," said Mr. Langhope, drawing his stick meditatively across his knee. "And, of course, if it'sthat, you'll land Bessy in a devil of a mess."
Without giving his son-in-law time to protest, he touched rapidly but vividly on the inutility and embarrassment of libel suits, and on the devices whereby the legal means of vindication from such attacks may be turned against those who have recourse to them; and Amherst listened with a sickened sense of the incompatibility between abstract standards of honour and their practical application.
"What should you do, then?" he murmured, as Mr. Langhope ended with his light shrug and a "See Tredegar, if you don't believe me"—; and his father-in-law replied with an evasive gesture: "Why, leave the responsibility where it belongs!"
"Where it belongs?"
"To Fenton Carbury, of course. Luckily it's nobody's business but his, and if he doesn't mind what is said about his wife I don't see how you can take up the cudgels for her without casting another shade on her somewhat chequered reputation."
Amherst stared. "His wife? What do I care what's said of her? I'm thinking of mine!"
"Well, if Carbury has no objection to his wife's meeting Bowfort, I don't see how you can object to her meeting him at your house. In such matters, as you know, it has mercifully been decided that the husband's attitude shall determine other people's; otherwise we should be deprived of the legitimate pleasure of slandering our neighbours." Mr. Langhope was always careful to temper his explanations with an "as you know": he would have thought it ill-bred to omit this parenthesis in elucidating the social code to his son-in-law.
"Then you mean that I can do nothing?" Amherst exclaimed.
Mr. Langhope smiled. "What applies to Carbury applies to you—by doing nothing you establish the fact that there's nothing to do; just as you create the difficulty by recognizing it." And he added, as Amherst sat silent: "Take Bessy away, and they'll have to see each other elsewhere."
Amherst returned to Lynbrook with the echoes of thiscasuistry in his brain. It seemed to him but a part of the ingenious system of evasion whereby a society bent on the undisturbed pursuit of amusement had contrived to protect itself from the intrusion of the disagreeable: a policy summed up in Mr. Langhope's concluding advice that Amherst should take his wife away. Yes—that was wealth's contemptuous answer to every challenge of responsibility: duty, sorrow and disgrace were equally to be evaded by a change of residence, and nothing in life need be faced and fought out while one could pay for a passage to Europe!
In a calmer mood Amherst's sense of humour would have preserved him from such a view of his father-in-law's advice; but just then it fell like a spark on his smouldering prejudices. He was clear-sighted enough to recognize the obstacles to legal retaliation; but this only made him the more resolved to assert his will in his own house. He no longer paused to consider the possible effect of such a course on his already strained relations with his wife: the man's will rose in him and spoke.
The scene between Bessy and himself was short and sharp; and it ended in a way that left him more than ever perplexed at the ways of her sex. Impatient of preamble, he had opened the attack with his ultimatum: the suspected couple were to be denied the house. Bessy flamed into immediate defence of her friend;but to Amherst's surprise she no longer sounded the note of her own rights. Husband and wife were animated by emotions deeper-seated and more instinctive than had ever before confronted them; yet while Amherst's resistance was gathering strength from the conflict, Bessy unexpectedly collapsed in tears and submission. She would do as he wished, of course—give up seeing Blanche, dismiss Bowfort, wash her hands, in short, of the imprudent pair—in such matters a woman needed a man's guidance, a wife must of necessity see with her husband's eyes; and she looked up into his through a mist of penitence and admiration....
Inthe first reaction from her brief delusion about Stephen Wyant, Justine accepted with a good grace the necessity of staying on at Lynbrook. Though she was now well enough to return to her regular work, her talk with Amherst had made her feel that, for the present, she could be of more use by remaining with Bessy; and she was not sorry to have a farther period of delay and reflection before taking the next step in her life. These at least were the reasons she gave herself for deciding not to leave; and if any less ostensible lurked beneath, they were not as yet visible even to her searching self-scrutiny.
At first she was embarrassed by the obligation of meeting Dr. Wyant, on whom her definite refusal had produced an effect for which she could not hold herself blameless. She had not kept her promise of seeing him on the day after their encounter at the post-office, but had written, instead, in terms which obviously made such a meeting unnecessary. But all her efforts to soften the abruptness of her answer could not conceal, from either herself or her suitor, that it was not the one she had led him to expect; and she foresaw that if she remained at Lynbrook she could not escape a scene of recrimination.
When the scene took place, Wyant's part in it went far toward justifying her decision; yet his vehement reproaches contained a sufficient core of truth to humble her pride. It was lucky for her somewhat exaggerated sense of fairness that he overshot the mark by charging her with a coquetry of which she knew herself innocent, and laying on her the responsibility for any follies to which her rejection might drive him. Such threats, as a rule, no longer move the feminine imagination; yet Justine's pity for all forms of weakness made her recognize, in the very heat of her contempt for Wyant, that his reproaches were not the mere cry of wounded vanity but the appeal of a nature conscious of its lack of recuperative power. It seemed to her as though she had done him irreparable harm,and the feeling might have betrayed her into too great a show of compassion had she not been restrained by a salutary fear of the result.
The state of Bessy's nerves necessitated frequent visits from her physician, but Justine, on these occasions, could usually shelter herself behind the professional reserve which kept even Wyant from any open expression of feeling. One day, however, they chanced to find themselves alone before Bessy's return from her ride. The servant had ushered Wyant into the library where Justine was writing, and when she had replied to his enquiries about his patient they found themselves face to face with an awkward period of waiting. Justine was too proud to cut it short by leaving the room; but Wyant answered her commonplaces at random, stirring uneasily to and fro between window and fireside, and at length halting behind the table at which she sat.
"May I ask how much longer you mean to stay here?" he said in a low voice, his eyes darkening under the sullen jut of the brows.
As she glanced up in surprise she noticed for the first time an odd contraction of his pupils, and the discovery, familiar enough in her professional experience, made her disregard the abruptness of his question and softened the tone in which she answered. "I hardly know—I suppose as long as I am needed."
Wyant laughed. "Needed by whom? By John Amherst?"
A moment passed before Justine took in the full significance of the retort; then the blood rushed to her face. "Yes—I believe both Mr. and Mrs. Amherst need me," she answered, keeping her eyes on his; and Wyant laughed again.
"You didn't think so till Amherst came back from Hanaford. His return seems to have changed your plans in several respects."
She looked away from him, for even now his eyes moved her to pity and self-reproach. "Dr. Wyant, you are not well; why do you wait to see Mrs. Amherst?" she said.
He stared at her and then his glance fell. "I'm much obliged—I'm as well as usual," he muttered, pushing the hair from his forehead with a shaking hand; and at that moment the sound of Bessy's voice gave Justine a pretext for escape.
In her own room she sank for a moment under a rush of self-disgust; but it soon receded before the saner forces of her nature, leaving only a residue of pity for the poor creature whose secret she had surprised. She had never before suspected Wyant of taking a drug, nor did she now suppose that he did so habitually; but to see him even momentarily under such an influence explained her instinctive sense of hisweakness. She felt now that what would have been an insult on other lips was only a cry of distress from his; and once more she blamed herself and forgave him.
But if she had been inclined to any morbidness of self-reproach she would have been saved from it by other cares. For the moment she was more concerned with Bessy's fate than with her own—her poor friend seemed to have so much more at stake, and so much less strength to bring to the defence of her happiness. Justine was always saved from any excess of self-compassion by the sense, within herself, of abounding forces of growth and self-renewal, as though from every lopped aspiration a fresh shoot of energy must spring; but she felt that Bessy had no such sources of renovation, and that every disappointment left an arid spot in her soul.
Even without her friend's confidences, Justine would have had no difficulty in following the successive stages of the Amhersts' inner history. She knew that Amherst had virtually resigned his rule at Westmore, and that his wife, in return for the sacrifice, was trying to conform to the way of life she thought he preferred; and the futility of both attempts was more visible to Justine than to either of the two concerned. She saw that the failure of the Amhersts' marriage lay not in any accident of outward circumstances but in the lack of all natural points of contact. As she put it to herself, they met neither underfoot nor overhead: practical necessities united them no more than imaginative joys.
There were moments when Justine thought Amherst hard to Bessy, as she suspected that he had once been hard to his mother—as the leader of men must perhaps always be hard to the hampering sex. Yet 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 ofhappiness, 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 recoveredpower 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'veno rightto 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 standardsaredifferent—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 BlancheI 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 ringingfor 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 toapply 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, 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 somefolly 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.Herhorse, led up and down byherservant, at the door ofherhouse!... 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 nowhe 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.