The Fruit of the Tree

to this stranger? Did she propose to tell him next that she had borrowed her dress from Effie Dressel? To cover her confusion she went on with a slight laugh: “But you haven’t told me.”

“What was I to tell you?”

“Whether to be glad or sorry that I broke my vow and told the truth about Dillon.”

They were standing face to face in the solitude of the garden-walk, forgetful of everything but the sudden surprised sense of intimacy that had marked their former brief communion. Justine had raised her eyes half- laughingly to Amherst, but they dropped before the unexpected seriousness of his.

“Why do you want to know?” he asked.

She made an effort to sustain the note of pleasantry.

“Well—it might, for instance, determine my future conduct. You see I’m still a nurse, and such problems are always likely to present themselves.”

“Ah, then don’t!”

“Don’t?”

“I mean—” He hesitated a moment, reaching up to break a rose from the branch that tapped his shoulder. “I was only thinking what risks we run when we scramble into the chariot of the gods and try to do the driving. Be passive—be passive, and you’ll be happier!”

“Oh, as to that—!” She swept it aside with one of her airy motions. “But Dillon, for instance—would he have been happier if I’d been passive?”

Amherst seemed to ponder. “There again—how can one tell?”

“And the risk’s not worth taking?”

“No!”

She paused, and they looked at each other again. “Do you mean that seriously, I wonder? Do you–-“

“Act on it myself? God forbid! The gods drive so badly. There’s poor Dillon…he happened to be in their way…as we all are at times.” He pulled himself up, and went on in a matter-of-fact tone: “In Dillon’s case, however, my axioms don’t apply. When my wife heard the truth she was, of course, immensely kind to him; and if it hadn’t been for you she might never have known.”

Justine smiled. “I think you would have found out—I was only the humble instrument. But now—” she hesitated—“now you must be able to do so much—”

Amherst lifted his head, and she saw the colour rise under his fair skin. “Out at Westmore? You’ve never been there since? Yes—my wife has made some changes; but it’s all so problematic—and one would have to live here….”

“You don’t, then?”

He answered by an imperceptible shrug. “Of course I’m here often; and she comes now and then. But the journey’s tiresome, and it is not always easy for her to get away.” He checked himself, and Justine saw that he, in turn, was suddenly conscious of the incongruity of explaining and extenuating his personal situation to a stranger. “But then we’re not strangers!” a voice in her exulted, just as he added, with an embarrassed attempt to efface and yet justify his moment of expansion: “That reminds me—I think you know my wife. I heard her asking Mrs. Dressel about you. She wants so much to see you.”

The transition had been effected, at the expense of dramatic interest, but to the obvious triumph of social observances; and to Justine, after all, regaining at his side the group about the marquee, the interest was not so much diminished as shifted to the no less suggestive problem of studying the friend of her youth in the unexpected character of John Amherst’s wife.

Meanwhile, however, during the brief transit across the Gaines greensward, her thoughts were still busy with Amherst. She had seen at once that the peculiar sense of intimacy reawakened by their meeting had been chilled and deflected by her first allusion to the topic which had previously brought them together: Amherst had drawn back as soon as she named the mills. What could be the cause of his reluctance? When they had last met, the subject burned within him: her being in actual fact a stranger had not, then, been an obstacle to his confidences. Now that he was master at Westmore it was plain that another tone became him—that his situation necessitated a greater reserve; but her enquiry did not imply the least wish to overstep this restriction: it merely showed her remembrance of his frankly-avowed interest in the operatives. Justine was struck by the fact that so natural an allusion should put him on the defensive. She did not for a moment believe that he had lost his interest in the mills; and that his point of view should have shifted with the fact of ownership she rejected as an equally superficial reading of his character. The man with whom she had talked at Dillon’s bedside was one in whom the ruling purposes had already shaped themselves, and to whom life, in whatever form it came, must henceforth take their mould. As she reached this point in her analysis, it occurred to her that his shrinking from the subject might well imply not indifference, but a deeper preoccupation: a preoccupation for some reason suppressed and almost disavowed, yet sustaining the more intensely its painful hidden life. From this inference it was but a leap of thought to the next—that the cause of the change must be sought outside of himself, in some external influence strong enough to modify the innate lines of his character. And where could such an influence be more obviously sought than in the marriage which had transformed the assistant manager of the Westmore Mills not, indeed, into their owner—that would rather have tended to simplify the problem—but into the husband of Mrs. Westmore? After all, the mills were Bessy’s—and for a farther understanding of the case it remained to find out what manner of person Bessy had become.

Justine’s first impression, as her friend’s charming arms received her—with an eagerness of welcome not lost on the suspended judgment of feminine Hanaford—the immediate impression was of a gain of emphasis, of individuality, as though the fluid creature she remembered had belied her prediction, and run at last into a definite mould. Yes—Bessy had acquired an outline: a graceful one, as became her early promise, though with, perhaps, a little more sharpness of edge than her youthful texture had promised. But the side she turned to her friend was still all softness—had in it a hint of the old pliancy, the impulse to lean and enlace, that at once woke in Justine the corresponding instinct of guidance and protection, so that their first kiss, before a word was spoken, carried the two back to the precise relation in which their school-days had left them. So easy a reversion to the past left no room for the sense of subsequent changes by which such reunions are sometimes embarrassed. Justine’s sympathies had, instinctively, and almost at once, transferred themselves to Bessy’s side—passing over at a leap the pained recognition that there were sides already—and Bessy had gathered up Justine into the circle of gentle self-absorption which left her very dimly aware of any distinctive characteristic in her friends except that of their affection for herself—since she asked only, as she appealingly put it, that they should all be “dreadfully fond” of her.