Amherst did not heed this injunction. He stood motionless, gripping the back of a chair, as if his next gesture might be to lift and hurl it at the speaker.
"Ask her——" Wyant repeated.
Amherst turned his head slowly, and his dull gaze rested on his wife. His face looked years older—lips and eyes moved as heavily as an old man's.
As he looked at her, Justine came forward without speaking, and laid the little morocco case in his hand. He held it there a moment, as if hardly understanding her action—then he tossed it on the table at his elbow, and walked up to Wyant.
"You hound," he said—"now go!"
WhenWyant had left the room, and the house-door had closed on him, Amherst spoke to his wife.
"Come upstairs," he said.
Justine followed him, scarcely conscious where she went, but moving already with a lighter tread. Part of her weight of misery had been lifted with Wyant's going. She had suffered less from the fear of what her husband might think than from the shame of making her avowal in her defamer's presence. And her faith in Amherst's comprehension had begun to revive. Hehad dismissed Wyant with scorn and horror—did not that show that he was on her side already? And how many more arguments she had at her call! Her brain hummed with them as she followed him up the stairs.
In her bedroom he closed the door and stood motionless, the same heavy half-paralyzed look on his face. It frightened her and she went up to him.
"John!" she said timidly.
He put his hand to his head. "Wait a moment——" he returned; and she waited, her heart slowly sinking again.
The moment over, he seemed to recover his power of movement. He crossed the room and threw himself into the armchair near the hearth.
"Now tell me everything."
He sat thrown back, his eyes fixed on the fire, and the vertical lines between his brows forming a deep scar in his white face.
Justine moved nearer, and touched his arm beseechingly. "Won't you look at me?"
He turned his head slowly, as if with an effort, and his eyes rested reluctantly on hers.
"Oh, not like that!" she exclaimed.
He seemed to make a stronger effort at self-control. "Please don't heed me—but say what there is to say," he said in a level voice, his gaze on the fire.
She stood before him, her arms hanging down, her clasped fingers twisting restlessly.
"I don't know that there is much to say—beyond what I've told you."
There was a slight sound in Amherst's throat, like the ghost of a derisive laugh. After another interval he said: "I wish to hear exactly what happened."
She seated herself on the edge of a chair near by, bending forward, with hands interlocked and arms extended on her knees—every line reaching out to him, as though her whole slight body were an arrow winged with pleadings. It was a relief to speak at last, even face to face with the stony image that sat in her husband's place; and she told her story, detail by detail, omitting nothing, exaggerating nothing, speaking slowly, clearly, with precision, aware that the bare facts were her strongest argument.
Amherst, as he listened, shifted his position once, raising his hand so that it screened his face; and in that attitude he remained when she had ended.
As she waited for him to speak, Justine realized that her heart had been alive with tremulous hopes. All through her narrative she had counted on a murmur of perception, an exclamation of pity: she had felt sure of melting the stony image. But Amherst said no word.
At length he spoke, still without turning his head. "You have not told me why you kept this from me."
A sob formed in her throat, and she had to wait to steady her voice.
"No—that was my wrong—my weakness. When I did it I never thought of being afraid to tell you—I had talked it over with you in my own mind...so often...before...."
"Well?"
"Then—- when you came back it was harder...though I was still sure you would approve me."
"Why harder?"
"Because at first—at Lynbrook—Icould nottell it all over, in detail, as I have now...it was beyond human power...and without doing so, I couldn't make it all clear to you...and so should only have added to your pain. If you had been there you would have done as I did.... I felt sure of that from the first. But coming afterward, you couldn't judge...no one who was not there could judge...and I wanted to spare you...."
"And afterward?"
She had shrunk in advance from this question, and she could not answer it at once. To gain time she echoed it. "Afterward?"
"Did it never occur to you, when we met later—when you first went to Mr. Langhope——"?
"To tell you then? No—because by that time I had come to see that I could never be quite sure of makingyou understand. No one who was not there at the time could know what it was to see her suffer."
"You thought it all over, then—decided definitely against telling me?"
"I did not have to think long. I felt I had done right—I still feel so—and I was sure you would feel so, if you were in the same circumstances."
There was another pause. Then Amherst said: "And last September—at Hanaford?"
It was the word for which she had waited—the word of her inmost fears. She felt the blood mount to her face.
"Did you see no difference—no special reason for telling me then?"
"Yes——" she faltered.
"Yet you said nothing."
"No."
Silence again. Her eyes strayed to the clock, and some dim association of ideas told her that Cicely would soon be coming in.
"Why did you say nothing?"
He lowered his hand and turned toward her as he spoke; and she looked up and faced him.
"Because I regarded the question as settled. I had decided it in my own mind months before, and had never regretted my decision. I should have thought it morbid...unnatural...to go over the whole subject again...to let it affect a situation that had come about...so much later...so unexpectedly."
"Did you never feel that, later, if I came to know—if others came to know—it might be difficult——?"
"No; for I didn't care for the others—and I believed that, whatever your own feelings were, you would know I had done what I thought right."
She spoke the words proudly, strongly, and for the first time the hard lines of his face relaxed, and a slight tremor crossed it.
"If you believed this, why have you been letting that cur blackmail you?"
"Because when he began I saw for the first time that what I had done might be turned against me by—by those who disliked our marriage. And I was afraid for my happiness. That was my weakness...it is what I am suffering for now."
"Suffering!" he echoed ironically, as though she had presumed to apply to herself a word of which he had the grim monopoly. He rose and took a few aimless steps; then he halted before her.
"That day—last month—when you asked me for money...was it...?"
"Yes——" she said, her head sinking.
He laughed. "You couldn't tell me—but you could use my money to bribe that fellow to conspire with you!"
"I had none of my own."
"No—nor I either! You usedhermoney.—God!" he groaned, turning away with clenched hands.
Justine had risen also, and she stood motionless, her hands clasped against her breast, in the drawn shrinking attitude of a fugitive overtaken by a blinding storm. He moved back to her with an appealing gesture.
"And you didn't see—it didn't occur to you—that your doing...as you did...was an obstacle—an insurmountable obstacle—to our ever ...?"
She cut him short with an indignant cry. "No! No! for it wasnot. How could it have anything to do with what...came after...with you or me? I did it only for Bessy—it concerned only Bessy!"
"Ah, don't name her!" broke from him harshly, and she drew back, cut to the heart.
There was another pause, during which he seemed to fall into a kind of dazed irresolution, his head on his breast, as though unconscious of her presence. Then he roused himself and went to the door.
As he passed her she sprang after him. "John—John! Is that all you have to say?"
"What more is there?"
"What more? Everything!—What right have you to turn from me as if I were a murderess? I did nothing but what your own reason, your own arguments,have justified a hundred times! I made a mistake in not telling you at once—but a mistake is not a crime. It can't be your real feeling that turns you from me—it must be the dread of what other people would think! But when have you cared for what other people thought? When have your own actions been governed by it?"
He moved another step without speaking, and she caught him by the arm. "No! you sha'n't go—not like that!—Wait!"
She turned and crossed the room. On the lower shelf of the little table by her bed a few books were ranged: she stooped and drew one hurriedly forth, opening it at the fly-leaf as she went back to Amherst.
"There—read that. The book was at Lynbrook—in your room—and I came across it by chance the very day...."
It was the little volume of Bacon which she was thrusting at him. He took it with a bewildered look, as if scarcely following what she said.
"Read it—read it!" she commanded; and mechanically he read out the words he had written.
"La vraie morale se moque de la morale.... We perish because we follow other men's examples.... Socrates called the opinions of the many Lamiæ.—Good God!" he exclaimed, flinging the book from him with a gesture of abhorrence.
Justine watched him with panting lips, her kneestrembling under her. "But you wrote it—you wrote it! I thought you meant it!" she cried, as the book spun across a table and dropped to the floor.
He looked at her coldly, almost apprehensively, as if she had grown suddenly dangerous and remote; then he turned and walked out of the room.
The striking of the clock roused her. She rose to her feet, rang the bell, and told the maid, through the door, that she had a headache, and was unable to see Miss Cicely. Then she turned back into the room, and darkness closed on her. She was not the kind to take grief passively—it drove her in anguished pacings up and down the floor. She walked and walked till her legs flagged under her; then she dropped stupidly into the chair where Amherst had sat....
All her world had crumbled about her. It was as if some law of mental gravity had been mysteriously suspended, and every firmly-anchored conviction, every accepted process of reasoning, spun disconnectedly through space. Amherst had not understood her—worse still, he had judged her as the world might judge her! The core of her misery was there. With terrible clearness she saw the suspicion that had crossed his mind—the suspicion that she had kept silence in the beginning because she loved him, and feared to lose him if she spoke.
And what if it were true? What if her unconscious guilt went back even farther than his thought dared to track it? She could not now recall a time when she had not loved him. Every chance meeting with him, from their first brief talk at Hanaford, stood out embossed and glowing against the blur of lesser memories. Was it possible that she had loved him during Bessy's life—that she had even, sub-consciously, blindly, been urged by her feeling for him to perform the act?
But she shook herself free from this morbid horror—the rebound of health was always prompt in her, and her mind instinctively rejected every form of moral poison. No! Her motive had been normal, sane and justifiable—completely justifiable. Her fault lay in having dared to rise above conventional restrictions, her mistake in believing that her husband could rise with her. These reflections steadied her but they did not bring much comfort. For her whole life was centred in Amherst, and she saw that he would never be able to free himself from the traditional view of her act. In looking back, and correcting her survey of his character in the revealing light of the last hours, she perceived that, like many men of emancipated thought, he had remained subject to the old conventions of feeling. And he had probably never given much thought to women till he met her—had always been content to deal with them in the accepted currency of sentiment.After all, it was the currency they liked best, and for which they offered their prettiest wares!
But what of the intellectual accord between himself and her? She had not been deceived in that! He and she had really been wedded in mind as well as in heart. But until now there had not arisen in their lives one of those searching questions which call into play emotions rooted far below reason and judgment, in the dark primal depths of inherited feeling. It is easy to judge impersonal problems intellectually, turning on them the full light of acquired knowledge; but too often one must still grope one's way through the personal difficulty by the dim taper carried in long-dead hands....
But was there then no hope of lifting one's individual life to a clearer height of conduct? Must one be content to think for the race, and to feel only—feel blindly and incoherently—for one's self? And was it not from such natures as Amherst's—natures in which independence of judgment was blent with strong human sympathy—that the liberating impulse should come?
Her mind grew weary of revolving in this vain circle of questions. The fact was that, in their particular case, Amherst had not risen above prejudice and emotion; that, though her act was one to which his intellectual sanction was given, he had turned from her with instinctive repugnance, had dishonoured her by themost wounding suspicions. The tie between them was forever stained and debased.
Justine's long hospital-discipline made it impossible for her to lose consciousness of the lapse of time, or to let her misery thicken into mental stupor. She could not help thinking and moving; and she presently lifted herself to her feet, turned on the light, and began to prepare for dinner. It would be terrible to face her husband across Mr. Langhope's pretty dinner-table, and afterward in the charming drawing-room, with its delicate old ornaments and intimate luxurious furniture; but she could not continue to sit motionless in the dark: it was her innermost instinct to pick herself up and go on.
While she dressed she listened anxiously for Amherst's step in the next room; but there was no sound, and when she dragged herself downstairs the drawing-room was empty, and the parlour-maid, after a decent delay, came to ask if dinner should be postponed.
She said no, murmuring some vague pretext for her husband's absence, and sitting alone through the succession of courses which composed the brief but carefully-studiedmenu. When this ordeal was over she returned to the drawing-room and took up a book. It chanced to be a new volume on labour problems, which Amherst must have brought back with him from Westmore; and it carried her thoughts instantly to themills. Would this disaster poison their work there as well as their personal relation? Would he think of her as carrying contamination even into the task their love had illumined?
The hours went on without his returning, and at length it occurred to her that he might have taken the night train to Hanaford. Her heart contracted at the thought: she remembered—though every nerve shrank from the analogy—his sudden flight at another crisis in his life, and she felt obscurely that if he escaped from her now she would never recover her hold on him. But could he be so cruel—could he wish any one to suffer as she was suffering?
At ten o'clock she could endure the drawing-room no longer, and went up to her room again. She undressed slowly, trying to prolong the process as much as possible, to put off the period of silence and inaction which would close in on her when she lay down on her bed. But at length the dreaded moment came—there was nothing more between her and the night. She crept into bed and put out the light; but as she slipped between the cold sheets a trembling seized her, and after a moment she drew on her dressing-gown again and groped her way to the lounge by the fire.
She pushed the lounge closer to the hearth and lay down, still shivering, though she had drawn the quilted coverlet up to her chin. She lay there a long time,with closed eyes, in a mental darkness torn by sudden flashes of memory. In one of these flashes a phrase of Amherst's stood out—a word spoken at Westmore, on the day of the opening of the Emergency Hospital, about a good-looking young man who had called to see her. She remembered Amherst's boyish burst of jealousy, his sudden relief at the thought that the visitor might have been Wyant. And no doubt itwasWyant—Wyant who had come to Hanaford to threaten her, and who, baffled by her non-arrival, or for some other unexplained reason, had left again without carrying out his purpose.
It was dreadful to think by how slight a chance her first draught of happiness had escaped that drop of poison; yet, when she understood, her inward cry was: "If it had happened, my dearest need not have suffered!"... Already she was feeling Amherst's pain more than her own, understanding that it was harder to bear than hers because it was at war with all the reflective part of his nature.
As she lay there, her face pressed into the cushions, she heard a sound through the silent house—the opening and closing of the outer door. She turned cold, and lay listening with strained ears.... Yes; now there was a step on the stairs—her husband's step! She heard him turn into his own room. The throbs of her heart almost deafened her—she only distinguishedconfusedly that he was moving about within, so close that it was as if she felt his touch. Then her door opened and he entered.
He stumbled slightly in the darkness before he found the switch of the lamp; and as he bent over it she saw that his face was flushed, and that his eyes had an excited light which, in any one less abstemious, might almost have seemed like the effect of wine.
"Are you awake?" he asked.
She started up against the cushions, her black hair streaming about her small ghostly face.
"Yes."
He walked over to the lounge and dropped into the low chair beside it.
"I've given that cur a lesson he won't forget," he exclaimed, breathing hard, the redness deepening in his face.
She turned on him in joy and trembling. "John!—Oh, John! You didn't follow him? Oh, what happened? What have you done?"
"No. I didn't follow him. But there are some things that even the powers above can't stand. And so they managed to let me run across him—by the merest accident—and I gave him something to remember."
He spoke in a strong clear voice that had a brightness like the brightness in his eyes. She felt its heat in her veins—the primitive woman in her glowed atcontact with the primitive man. But reflection chilled her the next moment.
"But why—why? Oh, how could you? Where did it happen—oh, not in the street?"
As she questioned him, there rose before her the terrified vision of a crowd gathering—the police, newspapers, a hideous publicity. He must have been mad to do it—and yet he must have done it because he loved her!
"No—no. Don't be afraid. The powers looked after that too. There was no one about—and I don't think he'll talk much about it."
She trembled, fearing yet adoring him. Nothing could have been more unlike the Amherst she fancied she knew than this act of irrational anger which had magically lifted the darkness from his spirit; yet, magically also, it gave him back to her, made them one flesh once more. And suddenly the pressure of opposed emotions became too strong, and she burst into tears.
She wept painfully, violently, with the resistance of strong natures unused to emotional expression; till at length, through the tumult of her tears, she felt her husband's reassuring touch.
"Justine," he said, speaking once more in his natural voice.
She raised her face from her hands, and they looked at each other.
"Justine—this afternoon—I said things I didn't mean to say."
Her lips parted, but her throat was still full of sobs, and she could only look at him while the tears ran down.
"I believe I understand now," he continued, in the same quiet tone.
Her hand shrank from his clasp, and she began to tremble again. "Oh, if you onlybelieve...if you're not sure...don't pretend to be!"
He sat down beside her and drew her into his arms. "I am sure," he whispered, holding her close, and pressing his lips against her face and hair.
"Oh, my husband—my husband! You've come back to me?"
He answered her with more kisses, murmuring through them: "Poor child—poor child—poor Justine...." while he held her fast.
With her face against him she yielded to the childish luxury of murmuring out unjustified fears. "I was afraid you had gone back to Hanaford——"
"Tonight? To Hanaford?"
"To tell your mother."
She felt a contraction of the arm embracing her, as though a throb of pain had stiffened it.
"I shall never tell any one," he said abruptly; but as he felt in her a responsive shrinking he gathered her close again, whispering through the hair that fellabout her cheek: "Don't talk, dear...let us never talk of it again...." And in the clasp of his arms her terror and anguish subsided, giving way, not to the deep peace of tranquillized thought, but to a confused well-being that lulled all thought to sleep.
Butthought could never be long silent between them; and Justine's triumph lasted but a day.
With its end she saw what it had been made of: the ascendency of youth and sex over his subjugated judgment. Her first impulse was to try and maintain it—why not use the protective arts with which love inspired her? She who lived so keenly in the brain could live as intensely in her feelings; her quick imagination tutored her looks and words, taught her the spells to weave about shorn giants. And for a few days she and Amherst lost themselves in this self-evoked cloud of passion, both clinging fast to the visible, the palpable in their relation, as if conscious already that its finer essence had fled.
Amherst made no allusion to what had passed, asked for no details, offered no reassurances—behaved as if the whole episode had been effaced from his mind. And from Wyant there came no sound: he seemed to have disappeared from life as he had from their talk.
Toward the end of the week Amherst announced that he must return to Hanaford; and Justine at once declared her intention of going with him.
He seemed surprised, disconcerted almost; and for the first time the shadow of what had happened fell visibly between them.
"But ought you to leave Cicely before Mr. Langhope comes back?" he suggested.
"He will be here in two days."
"But he will expect to find you."
"It is almost the first of April. We are to have Cicely with us for the summer. There is no reason why I should not go back to my work at Westmore."
There was in fact no reason that he could produce; and the next day they returned to Hanaford together.
With her perceptions strung to the last pitch of sensitiveness, she felt a change in Amherst as soon as they re-entered Bessy's house. He was still scrupulously considerate, almost too scrupulously tender; but with a tinge of lassitude, like a man who tries to keep up under the stupefying approach of illness. And she began to hate the power by which she held him. It was not thus they had once walked together, free in mind though so linked in habit and feeling; when their love was not a deadening drug but a vivifying element that cleared thought instead of stifling it. There were moments when she felt that open alienation would beeasier, because it would be nearer the truth. And at such moments she longed to speak, to beg him to utter his mind, to go with her once for all into the depths of the subject they continued to avoid. But at the last her heart always failed her: she could not face the thought of losing him, of hearing him speak estranging words to her.
They had been at Hanaford for about ten days when, one morning at breakfast, Amherst uttered a sudden exclamation over a letter he was reading.
"What is it?" she asked in a tremor.
He had grown very pale, and was pushing the hair from his forehead with the gesture habitual to him in moments of painful indecision.
"What is it?" Justine repeated, her fear growing.
"Nothing——" he began, thrusting the letter under the pile of envelopes by his plate; but she continued to look at him anxiously, till she drew his eyes to hers.
"Mr. Langhope writes that they've appointed Wyant to Saint Christopher's," he said abruptly.
"Oh, the letter—we forgot the letter!" she cried.
"Yes—we forgot the letter."
"But how dare he——?"
Amherst said nothing, but the long silence between them seemed full of ironic answers, till she brought out, hardly above her breath: "What shall you do?"
"Write at once—tell Mr. Langhope he's not fit for the place."
"Of course——" she murmured.
He went on tearing open his other letters, and glancing at their contents. She leaned back in her chair, her cup of coffee untasted, listening to the recurrent crackle of torn paper as he tossed aside one letter after another.
Presently he rose from his seat, and as she followed him from the dining-room she noticed that his breakfast had also remained untasted. He gathered up his letters and walked toward the smoking-room; and after a moment's hesitation she joined him.
"John," she said from the threshold.
He was just seating himself at his desk, but he turned to her with an obvious effort at kindness which made the set look of his face the more marked.
She closed the door and went up to him.
"If you write that to Mr. Langhope—Dr. Wyant will—will tell him," she said.
"Yes—we must be prepared for that."
She was silent, and Amherst flung himself down on the leather ottoman against the wall. She stood before him, clasping and unclasping her hands in speechless distress.
"What would you have me do?" he asked at length, almost irritably.
"I only thought...he told me he would keep straight...if he only had a chance," she faltered out.
Amherst lifted his head slowly, and looked at her. "You mean—I am to do nothing? Is that it?"
She moved nearer to him with beseeching eyes. "I can't bear it.... I can't bear that others should come between us," she broke out passionately.
He made no answer, but she could see a look of suffering cross his face, and coming still closer, she sank down on the ottoman, laying her hand on his. "John...oh, John, spare me," she whispered.
For a moment his hand lay quiet under hers; then he drew it out, and enclosed her trembling fingers.
"Very well—I'll give him a chance—I'll do nothing," he said, suddenly putting his other arm about her.
The reaction caught her by the throat, forcing out a dry sob or two; and as she pressed her face against him he raised it up and gently kissed her.
But even as their lips met she felt that they were sealing a treaty with dishonour. That his kiss should come to mean that to her! It was unbearable—worse than any personal pain—the thought of dragging him down to falsehood through her weakness.
She drew back and rose to her feet, putting aside his detaining hand.
"No—no! What am I saying? It can't be—youmust tell the truth." Her voice gathered strength as she spoke. "Oh, forget what I said—I didn't mean it!"
But again he seemed sunk in inaction, like a man over whom some baneful lethargy is stealing.
"John—John—forget!" she repeated urgently.
He looked up at her. "You realize what it will mean?"
"Yes—I realize.... But it must be.... And it will make no difference between us...will it?"
"No—no. Why should it?" he answered apathetically.
"Then write—tell Mr. Langhope not to give him the place. I want it over."
He rose slowly to his feet, without looking at her again, and walked over to the desk. She sank down on the ottoman and watched him with burning eyes while he drew forth a sheet of note-paper and began to write.
But after he had written a few words he laid down his pen, and swung his chair about so that he faced her.
"I can't do it in this way," he exclaimed.
"How then? What do you mean?" she said, starting up.
He looked at her. "Do you want the story to come from Wyant?"
"Oh——" She looked back at him with suddeninsight. "You mean to tell Mr. Langhope yourself?"
"Yes. I mean to take the next train to town and tell him."
Her trembling increased so much that she had to rest her hands against the edge of the ottoman to steady herself. "But if...if after all...Wyant should not speak?"
"Well—if he shouldn't? Could you bear to owe our safety tohim?"
"Safety!"
"It comes to that, doesn't it, ifwe'reafraid to speak?"
She sat silent, letting the bitter truth of this sink into her till it poured courage into her veins.
"Yes—it comes to that," she confessed.
"Then you feel as I do?"
"That you must go——?"
"That this is intolerable!"
The words struck down her last illusion, and she rose and went over to the writing-table. "Yes—go," she said.
He stood up also, and took both her hands, not in a caress, but gravely, almost severely.
"Listen, Justine. You must understand exactly what this means—may mean. I am willing to go onas we are now...as long as we can...because I love you...because I would do anything to spare you pain. But if I speak I must say everything—I must follow this thing up to its uttermost consequences. That's what I want to make clear to you."
Her heart sank with a foreboding of new peril. "What consequences?"
"Can't you see for yourself—when you look about this house?"
"This house——?"
He dropped her hands and took an abrupt turn across the room.
"I owe everything to her," he broke out, "all I am, all I have, all I have been able to give you—and I must go and tell her father that you...."
"Stop—stop!" she cried, lifting her hands as if to keep off a blow.
"No—don't make me stop. We must face it," he said doggedly.
"But this—this isn't the truth! You put it as if—almost as if——"
"Yes—don't finish.—Has it occurred to you thathemay think that?" Amherst asked with a terrible laugh. But at that she recovered her courage, as she always did when an extreme call was made on it.
"No—I don't believe it! If hedoes, it will be because you think it yourself...." Her voice sank, and she lifted her hands and pressed them to her temples."And if you think it, nothing matters...one way or the other...." She paused, and her voice regained its strength. "That is what I must face before you go: whatyouthink, whatyoubelieve of me. You've never told me that."
Amherst, at the challenge, remained silent, while a slow red crept to his cheek-bones.
"Haven't I told you by—by what I've done?" he said slowly.
"No—what you've done has covered up what you thought; and I've helped you cover it—I'm to blame too! But it was not for this that we...that we had that half-year together...not to sink into connivance and evasion! I don't want another hour of sham happiness. I want the truth from you, whatever it is."
He stood motionless, staring moodily at the floor. "Don't you see that's my misery—that I don't know myself?"
"You don't know...what you think of me?"
"Good God, Justine, why do you try to strip life naked? I don't know what's been going on in me these last weeks——"
"You must know what you think of my motive...for doing what I did."
She saw in his face how he shrank from the least allusion to the act about which their torment revolved. But he forced himself to raise his head and look at her. "I have never—for one moment—questioned yourmotive—or failed to see that it was justified...under the circumstances...."
"Oh, John—John!" she broke out in the wild joy of hearing herself absolved; but the next instant her subtle perceptions felt the unconscious reserve behind his admission.
"Your mind justifies me—not your heart; isn'tthatyour misery?" she said.
He looked at her almost piteously, as if, in the last resort, it was from her that light must come to him. "On my soul, I don't know...I can't tell...it's all dark in me. I know you did what you thought best...if I had been there, I believe I should have asked you to do it...but I wish to God——"
She interrupted him sobbingly. "Oh, I ought never to have let you love me! I ought to have seen that I was cut off from you forever. I have brought you wretchedness when I would have given my life for you! I don't deserve that you should forgive me for that."
Her sudden outbreak seemed to restore his self-possession. He went up to her and took her hand with a quieting touch.
"There is no question of forgiveness, Justine. Don't let us torture each other with vain repinings. Our business is to face the thing, and we shall be better for having talked it out. I shall be better, for my part,for having told Mr. Langhope. But before I go I want to be sure that you understand the view he may take...and the effect it will probably have on our future."
"Our future?" She started. "No, I don't understand."
Amherst paused a moment, as if trying to choose the words least likely to pain her. "Mr. Langhope knows that my marriage was...unhappy; through my fault, he no doubt thinks. And if he chooses to infer that...that you and I may have cared for each other...before...and that it wasbecausethere was a chance of recovery that you——"
"Oh——"
"We must face it," he repeated inflexibly. "And you must understand that, if there is the faintest hint of this kind, I shall give up everything here, as soon as it can be settled legally—God, how Tredegar will like the job!—and you and I will have to go and begin life over again...somewhere else."
For an instant a mad hope swelled in her—the vision of escaping with him into new scenes, a new life, away from the coil of memories that bound them down as in a net. But the reaction of reason came at once—she saw him cut off from his chosen work, his career destroyed, his honour clouded, above all—ah, this was what wrung them both!—his task undone, his peopleflung back into the depths from which he had lifted them. And all through her doing—all because she had clutched at happiness with too rash a hand! The thought stung her to passionate activity of mind—made her resolve to risk anything, dare anything, before she involved him farther in her own ruin. She felt her brain clear gradually, and the thickness dissolve in her throat.
"I understand," she said in a low voice, raising her eyes to his.
"And you're ready to accept the consequences? Think again before it's too late."
She paused. "That is what I should like...what I wanted to ask you...the time to think."
She saw a slight shade cross his face, as if he had not expected this failure of courage in her; but he said quietly: "You don't want me to go today?"
"Not today—give me one more day."
"Very well."
She laid a timid hand on his arm. "Please go out to Westmore as usual—as if nothing had happened. And tonight...when you come back...I shall have decided."
"Very well," he repeated.
"You'll be gone all day?"
He glanced at his watch. "Yes—I had meant to be; unless——"
"No; I would rather be alone. Good-bye," she said, letting her hand slip softly along his coat-sleeve as he turned to the door.
Athalf-past six that afternoon, just as Amherst, on his return from the mills, put the key into his door at Hanaford, Mrs. Ansell, in New York, was being shown into Mr. Langhope's library.
As she entered, her friend rose from his chair by the fire, and turned on her a face so disordered by emotion that she stopped short with an exclamation of alarm.
"Henry—what has happened? Why did you send for me?"
"Because I couldn't go to you. I couldn't trust myself in the streets—in the light of day."
"But why? What is it?—Not Cicely——?"
He struck both hands upward with a comprehensive gesture. "Cicely—everyone—the whole world!" His clenched fist came down on the table against which he was leaning. "Maria, my girl might have been saved!"
Mrs. Ansell looked at him with growing perturbation. "Saved—Bessy's life? But how? By whom?"
"She might have been allowed to live, I mean—to recover. She was killed, Maria; that woman killed her!"
Mrs. Ansell, with another cry of bewilderment, let herself drop helplessly into the nearest chair. "In heaven's name, Henry—what woman?"
He seated himself opposite to her, clutching at his stick, and leaning his weight heavily on it—a white dishevelled old man. "I wonder why you ask—just to spare me?"
Their eyes met in a piercing exchange of question and answer, and Mrs. Ansell tried to bring out reasonably: "I ask in order to understand what you are saying."
"Well, then, if you insist on keeping up appearances—my daughter-in-law killed my daughter. There you have it." He laughed silently, with a tear on his reddened eye-lids.
Mrs. Ansell groaned. "Henry, you are raving—I understand less and less."
"I don't see how I can speak more plainly. She told me so herself, in this room, not an hour ago."
"She told you? Who told you?"
"John Amherst's wife. Told me she'd killed my child. It's as easy as breathing—if you know how to use a morphia-needle."
Light seemed at last to break on his hearer. "Oh, my poor Henry—you mean—she gave too much? There was some dreadful accident?"
"There was no accident. She killed my child—killed her deliberately. Don't look at me as if I were a madman. She sat in that chair you're in when she told me."
"Justine? Has she been here today?" Mrs. Ansell paused in a painful effort to readjust her thoughts. "Butwhydid she tell you?"
"That's simple enough. To prevent Wyant's doing it."
"Oh——" broke from his hearer, in a long sigh of fear and intelligence. Mr. Langhope looked at her with a smile of miserable exultation.
"You knew—you suspected all along?—But now you must speak out!" he exclaimed with a sudden note of command.
She sat motionless, as if trying to collect herself. "I know nothing—I only meant—why was this never known before?"
He was upon her at once. "You think—because they understood each other? And now there's been a break between them? He wanted too big a share of the spoils? Oh, it's all so abysmally vile!"
He covered his face with a shaking hand, and Mrs. Ansell remained silent, plunged in a speechless misery of conjecture. At length she regained some measure of her habitual composure, and leaning forward, with her eyes on his face, said in a quiet tone: "If I am to help you, you must try to tell me just what has happened."
He made an impatient gesture. "Haven't I told you? She found that her accomplice meant to speak, and rushed to town to forestall him."
Mrs. Ansell reflected. "But why—with his place at Saint Christopher's secured—did Dr. Wyant choose this time to threaten her—if, as you imagine, he's an accomplice?"
"Because he's a drug-taker, and she didn't wish him to have the place."
"She didn't wish it? But that does not look as if she were afraid. She had only to hold her tongue!"
Mr. Langhope laughed sardonically. "It's not quite so simple. Amherst was coming to town to tell me."
"Ah—heknows?"
"Yes—and she preferred that I should have her version first."
"And what is her version?"
The furrows of misery deepened in Mr. Langhope's face. "Maria—don't ask too much of me! I can't go over it again. She says she wanted to spare my child—she says the doctors were keeping her alive, torturing her uselessly, as a...a sort of scientific experiment.... She forced on me the hideous details...."
Mrs. Ansell waited a moment.
"Well! May it not be true?"
"Wyant's version is different.Hesays Bessy would have recovered—he says Garford thought so too."
"And what does she answer? She denies it?"
"No. She admits that Garford was in doubt. But she says the chance was too remote—the pain too bad...that's her cue, naturally!"
Mrs. Ansell, leaning back in her chair, with hands meditatively stretched along its arms, gave herself up to silent consideration of the fragmentary statements cast before her. The long habit of ministering to her friends in moments of perplexity and distress had given her an almost judicial keenness in disentangling and coordinating facts incoherently presented, and in seizing on the thread of motive that connected them; but she had never before been confronted with a situation so poignant in itself, and bearing so intimately on her personal feelings; and she needed time to free her thoughts from the impending rush of emotion.
At last she raised her head and said: "Why did Mr. Amherst let her come to you, instead of coming himself?"
"He knows nothing of her being here. She persuaded him to wait a day, and as soon as he had gone to the mills this morning she took the first train to town."
"Ah——" Mrs. Ansell murmured thoughtfully; and Mr. Langhope rejoined, with a conclusive gesture: "Do you want more proofs of panic-stricken guilt?"
"Oh, guilt—" His friend revolved her large softmuff about a drooping hand. "There's so much still to understand."
"Your mind does not, as a rule, work so slowly!" he said with some asperity; but she paid no heed to his tone.
"Amherst, for instance—how long has he known of this?" she continued.
"A week or two only—she made that clear."
"And what is his attitude?"
"Ah—that, I conjecture, is just what she means to keep us from knowing!"
"You mean she's afraid——?"
Mr. Langhope gathered his haggard brows in a frown. "She's afraid, of course—mortally—I never saw a woman more afraid. I only wonder she had the courage to face me."
"Ah—that's it! Whydidshe face you? To extenuate her act—to give you her version, because she feared his might be worse? Do you gather that that was her motive?"
It was Mr. Langhope's turn to hesitate. He furrowed the thick Turkey rug with the point of his ebony stick, pausing once or twice to revolve it gimlet-like in a gap of the pile.
"Not her avowed motive, naturally."
"Well—at least, then, let me have that."
"Her avowed motive? Oh, she'd prepared one, ofcourse—trust her to have a dozen ready! The one she produced was—simply the desire to protect her husband."
"Her husband? Doeshetoo need protection?"
"My God, if he takes her side——! At any rate, her fear seemed to be that what she had done might ruin him; might cause him to feel—as well he may!—that the mere fact of being her husband makes his situation as Cicely's step-father, as my son-in-law, intolerable. And she came to clear him, as it were—to find out, in short, on what terms I should be willing to continue my present relations with him as though this hideous thing had not been known to me."
Mrs. Ansell raised her head quickly. "Well—and what were your terms?"
He hesitated. "She spared me the pain of proposing any—I had only to accept hers."
"Hers?"
"That she should disappear altogether from my sight—and from the child's, naturally. Good heaven, I should like to include Amherst in that! But I'm tied hand and foot, as you see, by Cicely's interests; and I'm bound to say she exonerated him completely—completely!"
Mrs. Ansell was again silent, but a swift flight of thoughts traversed her drooping face. "But if you are to remain on the old terms with her husband, how isshe to disappear out of your life without also disappearing out of his?"
Mr. Langhope gave a slight laugh. "I leave her to work out that problem."
"And you think Amherst will consent to such conditions?"
"He's not to know of them."
The unexpectedness of the reply reduced Mrs. Ansell to a sound of inarticulate interrogation; and Mr. Langhope continued: "Not at first, that is. She had thought it all out—foreseen everything; and she wrung from me—I don't yet know how!—a promise that when I saw him I would make it appear that I cleared him completely, not only of any possible complicity, or whatever you choose to call it, but of any sort of connection with the matter in my thoughts of him. I am, in short, to let him feel that he and I are to continue on the old footing—and I agreed, on the condition of her effacing herself somehow—of course on some other pretext."
"Some other pretext? But what conceivable pretext? My poor friend, he adores her!"
Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. "We haven't seen him since this became known to him.Shehas; and she let slip that he was horror-struck."
Mrs. Ansell looked up with a quick exclamation."Let slip? Isn't it much more likely that she forced it on you—emphasized it to the last limit of credulity?" She sank her hands to the arms of the chair, and exclaimed, looking him straight in the eyes: "You say she was frightened? It strikes me she was dauntless!"
Mr. Langhope stared a moment; then he said, with an ironic shrug: "No doubt, then, she counted on its striking me too."
Mrs. Ansell breathed a shuddering sigh. "Oh, I understand your feeling as you do—I'm deep in the horror of it myself. But I can't help seeing that this woman might have saved herself—and that she's chosen to save her husband instead. What I don't see, from what I know of him," she musingly proceeded, "is how, on any imaginable pretext, she will induce him to accept the sacrifice."
Mr. Langhope made a resentful movement. "If that's the only point your mind dwells on——!"
Mrs. Ansell looked up. "It doesn't dwell anywhere as yet—except, my poor Henry," she murmured, rising to move toward him, and softly laying her hand on his bent shoulder—"except on your distress and misery—on the very part I can't yet talk of, can't question you about...."
He let her hand rest there a moment; then he turned, and drawing it into his own tremulous fingers, pressedit silently, with a clinging helpless grasp that drew the tears to her eyes.
Justine Brent, in her earliest girlhood, had gone through one of those emotional experiences that are the infantile diseases of the heart. She had fancied herself beloved of a youth of her own age; had secretly returned his devotion, and had seen it reft from her by another. Such an incident, as inevitable as the measles, sometimes, like that mild malady, leaves traces out of all proportion to its actual virulence. The blow fell on Justine with tragic suddenness, and she reeled under it, thinking darkly of death, and renouncing all hopes of future happiness. Her ready pen often beguiled her into recording her impressions, and she now found an escape from despair in writing the history of a damsel similarly wronged. In her tale, the heroine killed herself; but the author, saved by this vicarious sacrifice, lived, and in time even smiled over her manuscript.
It was many years since Justine Amherst had recalled this youthful incident; but the memory of it recurred to her as she turned from Mr. Langhope's door. For a moment death seemed the easiest escape from what confronted her; but though she could no longer medicine her despair by turning it into fiction, she knew at once that she must somehow transpose it into terms ofaction, that she must always escape from life into more life, and not into its negation.
She had been carried into Mr. Langhope's presence by that expiatory passion which still burns so high, and draws its sustenance from so deep down, in the unsleeping hearts of women. Though she had never wavered in her conviction that her act had been justified her ideas staggered under the sudden comprehension of its consequences. Not till that morning had she seen those consequences in their terrible, unsuspected extent, had she understood how one stone rashly loosened from the laboriously erected structure of human society may produce remote fissures in that clumsy fabric. She saw that, having hazarded the loosening of the stone, she should have held herself apart from ordinary human ties, like some priestess set apart for the service of the temple. And instead, she had seized happiness with both hands, taken it as the gift of the very fate she had herself precipitated! She remembered some old Greek saying to the effect that the gods never forgive the mortal who presumes to love and suffer like a god. She had dared to do both, and the gods were bringing ruin on that deeper self which had its life in those about her.
So much had become clear to her when she heard Amherst declare his intention of laying the facts before Mr. Langhope. His few broken words lit up thefarthest verge of their lives. She saw that his retrospective reverence for his wife's memory, which was far as possible removed from the strong passion of the mind and senses that bound him to herself, was indelibly stained and desecrated by the discovery that all he had received from the one woman had been won for him by the deliberate act of the other. This was what no reasoning, no appeal to the calmer judgment, could ever, in his inmost thoughts, undo or extenuate. It could find appeasement only in the renunciation of all that had come to him from Bessy; and this renunciation, so different from the mere sacrifice of material well-being, was bound up with consequences so far-reaching, so destructive to the cause which had inspired his whole life, that Justine felt the helpless terror of the mortal who has launched one of the heavenly bolts.
She could think of no way of diverting it but the way she had chosen. She must see Mr. Langhope first, must clear Amherst of the least faint association with her act or her intention. And to do this she must exaggerate, not her own compunction—for she could not depart from the exact truth in reporting her feelings and convictions—but her husband's first instinctive movement of horror, the revulsion of feeling her confession had really produced in him. This was the most painful part of her task, and for this reason her excited imagination clothed it with a special expiatory value.If she could purchase Amherst's peace of mind, and the security of his future, by confessing, and even over-emphasizing, the momentary estrangement between them there would be a bitter joy in such payment!
Her hour with Mr. Langhope proved the correctness of her intuition. She could save Amherst only by effacing herself from his life: those about him would be only too ready to let her bear the full burden of obloquy. She could see that, for a dozen reasons, Mr. Langhope, even in the first shock of his dismay, unconsciously craved a way of exonerating Amherst, of preserving intact the relation on which so much of his comfort had come to depend. And she had the courage to make the most of his desire, to fortify it by isolating Amherst's point of view from hers; so that, when the hour was over, she had the solace of feeling that she had completely freed him from any conceivable consequence of her act.
So far, the impetus of self-sacrifice had carried her straight to her goal; but, as frequently happens with such atoning impulses, it left her stranded just short of any subsequent plan of conduct. Her next step, indeed, was clear enough: she must return to Hanaford, explain to her husband that she had felt impelled to tell her own story to Mr. Langhope, and then take up her ordinary life till chance offered her a pretext for fulfilling her promise. But what pretext was likely to present itself? No symbolic horn would sound the hour of fulfillment; she must be her own judge, and hear the call in the depths of her own conscience.
WhenAmherst, returning late that afternoon from Westmore, learned of his wife's departure, and read the note she had left, he found it, for a time, impossible to bring order out of the confusion of feeling produced in him.
His mind had been disturbed enough before. All day, through the routine of work at the mills, he had laboured inwardly with the difficulties confronting him; and his unrest had been increased by the fact that his situation bore an ironic likeness to that in which, from a far different cause, he had found himself at the other crisis of his life. Once more he was threatened with the possibility of having to give up Westmore, at a moment when concentration of purpose and persistency of will were at last beginning to declare themselves in tangible results. Before, he had only given up dreams; now it was their fruition that he was asked to surrender. And he was fixed in his resolve to withdraw absolutely from Westmore if the statement he had to make to Mr. Langhope was received with the least hint of an offensive mental reservation. All formsof moral compromise had always been difficult to Amherst, and like many men absorbed in large and complicated questions he craved above all clearness and peace in his household relation. The first months of his second marriage had brought him, as a part of richer and deeper joys, this enveloping sense of a clear moral medium, in which no subterfuge or equivocation could draw breath. He had felt that henceforth he could pour into his work all the combative energy, the powers of endurance, resistance, renovation, which had once been unprofitably dissipated in the vain attempt to bring some sort of harmony into life with Bessy. Between himself and Justine, apart from their love for each other, there was the wider passion for their kind, which gave back to them an enlarged and deepened reflection of their personal feeling. In such an air it had seemed that no petty egotism could hamper their growth, no misintelligence obscure their love; yet all the while this pure happiness had been unfolding against a sordid background of falsehood and intrigue from which his soul turned with loathing.
Justine was right in assuming that Amherst had never thought much about women. He had vaguely regarded them as meant to people that hazy domain of feeling designed to offer the busy man an escape from thought. His second marriage, leading him to the blissful discovery that woman can think as well as feel, that thereare beings of the ornamental sex in whom brain and heart have so enlarged each other that their emotions are as clear as thought, their thoughts as warm as emotions—this discovery had had the effect of making him discard his former summary conception of woman as a bundle of inconsequent impulses, and admit her at a stroke to full mental equality with her lord. The result of this act of manumission was, that in judging Justine he could no longer allow for what was purely feminine in her conduct. It was incomprehensible to him that she, to whom truth had seemed the essential element of life, should have been able to draw breath, and find happiness, in an atmosphere of falsehood and dissimulation. His mind could assent—at least in the abstract—to the reasonableness of her act; but he was still unable to understand her having concealed it from him. He could enter far enough into her feelings to allow for her having kept silence on his first return to Lynbrook, when she was still under the strain of a prolonged and terrible trial; but that she should have continued to do so when he and she had discovered and confessed their love for each other, threw an intolerable doubt on her whole course.
He stayed late at the mills, finding one pretext after another for delaying his return to Hanaford, and trying, while he gave one part of his mind to the methodical performance of his task, to adjust the other to somedefinite view of the future. But all was darkened and confused by the sense that, between himself and Justine, complete communion of thought was no longer possible. It had, in fact, never existed; there had always been a locked chamber in her mind, and he knew not yet what other secrets might inhabit it.
The shock of finding her gone when he reached home gave a new turn to his feelings. She had made no mystery of her destination, leaving word with the servants that she had gone to town to see Mr. Langhope; and Amherst found a note from her on his study table.
"I feel," she wrote, "that I ought to see Mr. Langhope myself, and be the first to tell him what must be told. It was like you, dearest, to wish to spare me this, but it would have made me more unhappy; and Mr. Langhope might wish to hear the facts in my own words. I shall come back tomorrow, and after that it will be for you to decide what must be done."
The brevity and simplicity of the note were characteristic; in moments of high tension Justine was always calm and direct. And it was like her, too, not to make any covert appeal to his sympathy, not to seek to entrap his judgment by caressing words and plaintive allusions. The quiet tone in which she stated her purpose matched the firmness and courage of the act, and for a moment Amherst was shaken by a revulsionof feeling. Her heart was level with his, after all—if she had done wrong she would bear the brunt of it alone. It was so exactly what he himself would have felt and done in such a situation that faith in her flowed back through all the dried channels of his heart. But an instant later the current set the other way. The wretched years of his first marriage had left in him a residue of distrust, a tendency to dissociate every act from its ostensible motive. He had been too profoundly the dupe of his own enthusiasm not to retain this streak of scepticism, and it now moved him to ask if Justine's sudden departure had not been prompted by some other cause than the one she avowed. Had that alone actuated her, why not have told it to him, and asked his consent to her plan? Why let him leave the house without a hint of her purpose, and slip off by the first train as soon as he was safe at Westmore? Might it not be that she had special reasons for wishing Mr. Langhope tohear her own version first—that there were questions she wished to parry herself, explanations she could trust no one to make for her? The thought plunged Amherst into deeper misery. He knew not how to defend himself against these disintegrating suspicions—he felt only that, once the accord between two minds is broken, it is less easy to restore than the passion between two hearts. He dragged heavily through his solitary evening, and awaited withdread and yet impatience a message announcing his wife's return.
It would have been easier—far easier—when she left Mr. Langhope's door, to go straight out into the darkness and let it close in on her for good.
Justine felt herself yielding to the spell of that suggestion as she walked along the lamplit pavement, hardly conscious of the turn her steps were taking. The door of the house which a few weeks before had been virtually hers had closed on her without a question. She had been suffered to go out into the darkness without being asked whither she was going, or under what roof her night would be spent. The contrast between her past and present sounded through the tumult of her thoughts like the evil laughter of temptation. The house at Hanaford, to which she was returning, would look at her with the same alien face—nowhere on earth, at that moment, was a door which would open to her like the door of home.
In her painful self-absorption she followed the side street toward Madison Avenue, and struck southward down that tranquil thoroughfare. There was a physical relief in rapid motion, and she walked on, still hardly aware of her direction, toward the clustered lights of Madison Square. Should she return to Hanaford, she had still several hours to dispose of before the departure of the midnight train; and if she did not return, hours and dates no longer existed for her.
It would be easier—infinitely easier—not to go back. To take up her life with Amherst would, under any circumstances, be painful enough; to take it up under the tacit restriction of her pledge to Mr. Langhope seemed more than human courage could face. As she approached the square she had almost reached the conclusion that such a temporary renewal was beyond her strength—beyond what any standard of duty exacted. The question of an alternative hardly troubled her. She would simply go on living, and find an escape in work and material hardship. It would not be hard for so inconspicuous a person to slip back into the obscure mass of humanity.
She paused a moment on the edge of the square, vaguely seeking a direction for her feet that might permit the working of her thoughts to go on uninterrupted; and as she stood there, her eyes fell on the bench near the corner of Twenty-sixth Street, where she had sat with Amherst on the day of his flight from Lynbrook. He too had dreamed of escaping from insoluble problems into the clear air of hard work and simple duties; and she remembered the words with which she had turned him back. The cases, of course, were not identical, since he had been flying in anger and wounded pride from a situation for which he was in no wise to blame;yet, if even at such a moment she had insisted on charity and forbearance, how could she now show less self-denial than she had exacted of him?
"If you go away for a time, surely it ought to be in such a way that your going does not seem to cast any reflection on Bessy...." That was how she had put it to him, and how, with the mere change of a name, she must now, for reasons as cogent, put it to herself. It was just as much a part of the course she had planned to return to her husband now, and take up their daily life together, as it would, later on, be her duty to drop out of that life, when her doing so could no longer involve him in the penalty to be paid.