The Fruit of the Tree

seemed to be living at Hanaford: in reality they were voyaging on unmapped seas of adventure. The seas were limitless, and studded with happy islands: every fresh discovery they made about each other, every new agreement of ideas and feelings, offered itself to these intrepid explorers as a friendly coast where they might beach their keel and take their bearings. Thus, in the thronging hum of metaphor, Justine sometimes pictured their relation; seeing it, again, as a journey through crowded populous cities, where every face she met was Amherst’s; or, contrarily, as a multiplication of points of perception, so that one became, for the world’s contact, a surface so multitudinously alive that the old myth of hearing the grass grow and walking the rainbow explained itself as the heightening of personality to the utmost pitch of sympathy.

In reality, the work at Westmore became an almost necessary sedative after these flights into the blue. She felt sometimes that they would have been bankrupted of sensations if daily hours of drudgery had not provided a reservoir in which fresh powers of enjoyment could slowly gather. And their duties had the rarer quality of constituting, precisely, the deepest, finest bond between them, the clarifying element which saved their happiness from stagnation, and kept it in the strong mid-current of human feeling.

It was this element in their affection which, in the last days of November, was unexpectedly put on trial. Mr. Langhope, since his return from his annual visit to Europe, showed signs of diminishing strength and elasticity. He had had to give up his nightly dinner parties, to desert his stall at the Opera: to take, in short, as he plaintively put it, his social pleasures hom?opathically. Certain of his friends explained the change by saying that he had never been “quite the same” since his daughter’s death; while others found its determining cause in the shock of Amherst’s second marriage. But this insinuation Mr. Langhope in due time discredited by writing to ask the Amhersts if they would not pity his loneliness and spend the winter in town with him. The proposal came in a letter to Justine, which she handed to her husband one afternoon on his return from the mills.

She sat behind the tea-table in the Westmore drawing-room, now at last transformed, not into Mrs. Dressel’s vision of “something lovely in Louis Seize,” but into a warm yet sober setting for books, for scattered flowers, for deep chairs and shaded lamps in pleasant nearness to each other.

Amherst raised his eyes from the letter, thinking as he did so how well her bright head, with its flame-like play of meanings, fitted into the background she had made for it. Still unobservant of external details, he was beginning to feel a vague well-being of the eye wherever her touch had passed.

“Well, we must do it,” he said simply.

“Oh, must we?” she murmured, holding out his cup.

He smiled at her note of dejection. “Unnatural woman! New York versus Hanaford— do you really dislike it so much?”

She tried to bring a tone of consent into her voice. “I shall be very glad to be with Cicely again—and that, of course,” she reflected, “is the reason why Mr. Langhope wants us.”

“Well—if it is, it’s a good reason.”

“Yes. But how much shall you be with us?”

“If you say so, I’ll arrange to get away for a month or two.”

“Oh, no: I don’t want that!” she said, with a smile that triumphed a little. “But why should not Cicely come here?”

“If Mr. Langhope is cut off from his usual amusements, I’m afraid that would only make him more lonely.”

“Yes, I suppose so.” She put aside her untasted cup, resting her elbows on her knees, and her chin on her clasped hands, in the attitude habitual to her in moments of inward debate.

Amherst rose and seated himself on the sofa beside her. “Dear! What is it?” he said, drawing her hands down, so that she had to turn her face to his.

“Nothing…I don’t know…a superstition. I’ve been so happy here!”

“Is our happiness too perishable to be transplanted?”

She smiled and answered by another question. “You don’t mind doing it, then?”

Amherst hesitated. “Shall I tell you? I feel that it’s a sort of ring of Polycrates. It may buy off the jealous gods.”

A faint shrinking from some importunate suggestion seemed to press her closer to him. “Then you feel they are jealous?” she breathed, in a half-laugh.

“I pity them if they’re not!”

“Yes,” she agreed, rallying to his tone. “I only had a fancy that they might overlook such a dull place as Hanaford.”

Amherst drew her to him. “Isn’t it, on the contrary, in the ash-heaps that the rag-pickers prowl?”

 

There was no disguising it: she was growing afraid of her happiness. Her husband’s analogy of the ring expressed her fear. She seemed to herself to carry a blazing jewel on her breast—something that singled her out for human envy and divine pursuit. She had a preposterous longing to dress plainly and shabbily, to subdue her voice and gestures, to try to slip through life unnoticed; yet all the while she knew that her jewel would shoot its rays through every disguise. And from the depths of ancient atavistic instincts came the hope that Amherst was right—that by sacrificing their precious solitude to Mr. Langhope’s convenience they might still deceive the gods.

 

Once pledged to her new task, Justine, as usual, espoused it with ardour. It was pleasant, even among greater joys, to see her husband again frankly welcomed by Mr. Langhope; to see Cicely bloom into happiness at their coming; and to overhear Mr.