The Fruit of the Tree

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 to sell 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 mechanically noting 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