The Fruit of the Tree

to provide for Ned,” some one let fall in the course of one of the smoking-room dissertations on which the host of Lynbrook had such difficulty in fixing his attention; and the speaker’s matter-of-course tone, and the careless acquiescence of his hearers, were more offensive to Amherst than the fact itself. In the first flush of his disgust he classed the story as one of the lies bred in the malarious air of after-dinner gossip; but gradually he saw that, whether true or not, it had sufficient circulation to cast a shade of ambiguity on the persons concerned. Bessy alone seemed deaf to the rumours about her friend. There was something captivating to her in Mrs. Carbury’s slang and noise, in her defiance of decorum and contempt of criticism. “I like Blanche because she doesn’t pretend,” was Bessy’s vague justification of the lady; but in reality she was under the mysterious spell which such natures cast over the less venturesome imaginations of their own sex.

Amherst at first tried to deaden himself to the situation, as part of the larger coil of miseries in which he found himself; but all his traditions were against such tolerance, and they were roused to revolt by the receipt of a newspaper clipping, sent by an anonymous hand, enlarging on the fact that the clandestine meetings of a fashionable couple were being facilitated by the connivance of a Long Island chatelaine. Amherst, hot from the perusal of this paragraph, sprang into the first train, and laid the clipping before his father- in-law, who chanced to be passing through town on his way from the Hudson to the Hot Springs.

Mr. Langhope, ensconced in the cushioned privacy of the reading-room at the Amsterdam Club, where he had invited his son-in-law to meet him, perused the article with the cool eye of the collector to whom a new curiosity is offered.

“I suppose,” he mused, “that in the time of the Pharaohs the Morning Papyrus used to serve up this kind of thing”—and then, as the nervous tension of his hearer expressed itself in an abrupt movement, he added, handing back the clipping with a smile: “What do you propose to do? Kill the editor, and forbid Blanche and Bowfort the house?”

“I mean to do something,” Amherst began, suddenly chilled by the realization that his wrath had not yet shaped itself into a definite plan of action.

“Well, it must be that or nothing,” said Mr. Langhope, drawing his stick meditatively across his knee. “And, of course, if it’s that, you’ll land Bessy in a devil of a mess.”

Without giving his son-in-law time to protest, he touched rapidly but vividly on the inutility and embarrassment of libel suits, and on the devices whereby the legal means of vindication from such attacks may be turned against those who have recourse to them; and Amherst listened with a sickened sense of the incompatibility between abstract standards of honour and their practical application.

“What should you do, then?” he murmured, as Mr. Langhope ended with his light shrug and a “See Tredegar, if you don’t believe me”—; and his father-in-law replied with an evasive gesture: “Why, leave the responsibility where it belongs!”

“Where it belongs?”

“To Fenton Carbury, of course. Luckily it’s nobody’s business but his, and if he doesn’t mind what is said about his wife I don’t see how you can take up the cudgels for her without casting another shade on her somewhat chequered reputation.”

Amherst stared. “His wife? What do I care what’s said of her? I’m thinking of mine!”

“Well, if Carbury has no objection to his wife’s meeting Bowfort, I don’t see how you can object to her meeting him at your house. In such matters, as you know, it has mercifully been decided that the husband’s attitude shall determine other people’s; otherwise we should be deprived of the legitimate pleasure of slandering our neighbours.” Mr. Langhope was always careful to temper his explanations with an “as you know”: he would have thought it ill- bred to omit this parenthesis in elucidating the social code to his son-in-law.

“Then you mean that I can do nothing?” Amherst exclaimed.

Mr. Langhope smiled. “What applies to Carbury applies to you—by doing nothing you establish the fact that there’s nothing to do; just as you create the difficulty by recognizing it.” And he added, as Amherst sat silent: “Take Bessy away, and they’ll have to see each other elsewhere.”

 

Amherst returned to Lynbrook with the echoes of this casuistry in his brain. It seemed to him but a part of the ingenious system of evasion whereby a society bent on the undisturbed pursuit of amusement had contrived to protect itself from the intrusion of the disagreeable: a policy summed up in Mr. Langhope’s concluding advice that Amherst should take his wife away. Yes—that was wealth’s contemptuous answer to every challenge of responsibility: duty, sorrow and disgrace were equally to be evaded by a change of residence, and nothing in life need be faced and fought out while one could pay for a passage to Europe!

In a calmer mood Amherst’s sense of humour would have preserved him from such a view of his father-in-law’s advice; but just then it fell like a spark on his smouldering prejudices. He was clear-sighted enough to recognize the obstacles to legal retaliation; but this only made him the more resolved to assert his will in his own house. He no longer paused to consider the possible effect of such a course on his already strained relations with his wife: the man’s will rose in him and spoke.

The scene between Bessy and himself was short and sharp; and it ended in a way that left him more than ever perplexed at the ways of her sex. Impatient of preamble, he had opened the attack with his ultimatum: the suspected couple were to be denied the house. Bessy flamed into immediate defence of her friend; but to Amherst’s surprise she no longer sounded the note of her own rights. Husband and wife were animated by emotions deeper-seated and more instinctive than had ever before confronted them; yet while Amherst’s resistance was gathering strength from the conflict, Bessy unexpectedly collapsed in tears and submission. She would do as he wished, of course—give up seeing Blanche, dismiss Bowfort, wash her hands, in short, of the imprudent pair—in such matters a woman needed a man’s guidance, a wife must of necessity see with her husband’s eyes; and she looked up into his through a mist of penitence and admiration…. XXI

IN the first reaction from her brief delusion about Stephen Wyant, Justine accepted with a good grace the necessity of staying on at Lynbrook. Though she was now well enough to return to her regular work, her talk with Amherst had made her feel that, for the present, she could be of more use by remaining with Bessy; and