The Fruit of the Tree

She saw a look of pain in his eyes. He continued to lean against the mantel-shelf, his head slightly lowered, his unseeing gaze fixed on a remote scroll in the pattern of the carpet; then he said in a low tone: “I can only repeat again what I have said before—that I understand why you did what you did.”

“Thank you,” she answered, in the same tone.

There was another pause, for she could not trust herself to go on speaking; and presently he asked, with a tinge of bitterness in his voice: “That does not satisfy you?”

She hesitated. “It satisfies me as much as it does you—and no more,” she replied at length.

He looked up hastily. “What do you mean?”

“Just what I say. We can neither of us go on living on that understanding just at present.” She rose as she spoke, and crossed over to the hearth. “I want to go back to my nursing—to go out to Michigan, to a town where I spent a few months the year before I first came to Hanaford. I have friends there, and can get work easily. And you can tell people that I was ill and needed a change.”

It had been easier to say than she had imagined, and her voice held its clear note till the end; but when she had ceased, the whole room began to reverberate with her words, and through the clashing they made in her brain she felt a sudden uncontrollable longing that they should provoke in him a cry of protest, of resistance. Oh, if he refused to let her go—if he caught her to him, and defied the world to part them—what then of her pledge to Mr. Langhope, what then of her resolve to pay the penalty alone?

But in the space of a heart-beat she knew that peril—that longed-for peril!—was past. Her husband had remained silent—he neither moved toward her nor looked at her; and she felt in every slackening nerve that in the end he would let her go.

XL

MR. LANGHOPE, tossing down a note on Mrs. Ansell’s drawing-room table, commanded imperiously: “Read that!”

She set aside her tea-cup, and looked up, not at the note, but into his face, which was crossed by one of the waves of heat and tremulousness that she was beginning to fear for him. Mr. Langhope had changed greatly in the last three months; and as he stood there in the clear light of the June afternoon it came to her that he had at last suffered the sudden collapse which is the penalty of youth preserved beyond its time.

“What is it?” she asked, still watching him as she put out her hand for the letter.

“Amherst writes to remind me of my promise to take Cicely to Hanaford next week, for her birthday.”

“Well—it was a promise, wasn’t it?” she rejoined, running her eyes over the page.

“A promise—yes; but made before…. Read the note—you’ll see there’s no reference to his wife. For all I know, she’ll be there to receive us.”

“But that was a promise too.”

“That neither Cicely nor I should ever set eyes on her? Yes. But why should she keep it? I was a fool that day —she fooled me as she’s fooled us all! But you saw through it from the beginning—you said at once that she’d never leave him.”

Mrs. Ansell reflected. “I said that before I knew all the circumstances. Now I think differently.”

“You think she still means to go?”

She handed the letter back to him. “I think this is to tell you so.”

“This?” He groped for his glasses, dubiously scanning the letter again.

“Yes. And what’s more, if you refuse to go she’ll have every right to break her side of the agreement.”

Mr. Langhope sank into a chair, steadying himself painfully with his stick. “Upon my soul, I sometimes think you’re on her side!” he ejaculated.

“No—but I like fair play,” she returned, measuring his tea carefully into his favourite little porcelain tea- pot.

“Fair play?”

“She’s offering to do her part. It’s for you to do yours now—to take Cicely to Hanaford.”

“If I find her there, I never cross Amherst’s threshold again!”

Mrs. Ansell, without answering, rose and put his tea-cup on the slender-legged table at his elbow; then, before returning to her seat, she found the enamelled match-box and laid it by the cup. It was becoming difficult for Mr. Langhope to guide his movements about her small encumbered room; and he had always liked being waited on.

 

Mrs. Ansell’s prognostication proved correct. When Mr. Langhope and Cicely arrived at Hanaford they found Amherst alone to receive them. He explained briefly that his wife had been unwell, and had gone to seek rest and change at the house of an old friend in the west. Mr. Langhope expressed a decent amount of regret, and the subject was dropped as if by common consent. Cicely, however, was not so easily silenced. Poor Bessy’s uncertain fits of tenderness had produced more bewilderment than pleasure in her sober-minded child; but the little girl’s feelings and perceptions had developed rapidly in the equable atmosphere of her stepmother’s affection. Cicely had reached the age when children put their questions with as much ingenuity as persistence, and both Mr. Langhope and Amherst longed for Mrs. Ansell’s aid in parrying her incessant interrogations as to the cause and length of Justine’s absence, what she had said before going, and what promise she had made about coming back. But Mrs. Ansell had not come to Hanaford. Though it had become a matter of habit to include her in the family pilgrimages to the mills she had firmly maintained the plea of more urgent engagements; and the two men, with only Cicely between them, had spent the long days and longer evenings in unaccustomed and unmitigated propinquity.