The Fruit of the Tree

deeply hurt—so deeply that he will make no advance, no sign of relenting. That’s what I thought when I first read it…but the postscript undoes it all.”

Justine, as she spoke, had drawn near Bessy, laying a hand on her arm, and shedding on her the radiance of a face all charity and sweet compassion. It was her rare gift, at such moments, to forget her own relation to the person for whose fate she was concerned, to cast aside all consciousness of criticism and distrust in the heart she strove to reach, as pitiful people forget their physical timidity in the attempt to help a wounded animal.

For a moment Bessy seemed to waver. The colour flickered faintly up her cheek, her long lashes drooped—she had the tenderest lids!—and all her face seemed melting under the beams of Justine’s ardour. But the letter was still in her hand—her eyes, in sinking, fell upon it, and she sounded beneath her breath the fatal phrase: “‘I have done this solely because you asked it.’

“After such a tribute to your influence I don’t wonder you feel competent to set everybody’s affairs in order! But take my advice, my dear—_don’t_ ask me not to ride Impulse!”

The pity froze on Justine’s lip: she shrank back cut to the quick. For a moment the silence between the two women rang with the flight of arrowy, wounding thoughts; then Bessy’s anger flagged, she gave one of her embarrassed half-laughs, and turning back, laid a deprecating touch on her friend’s arm.

“I didn’t mean that, Justine…but let us not talk now—I can’t!”

Justine did not move: the reaction could not come as quickly in her case. But she turned on Bessy two eyes full of pardon, full of speechless pity…and Bessy received the look silently before she moved to the door and went out.

“Oh, poor thing—poor thing!” Justine gasped as the door closed.

She had already forgotten her own hurt—she was alone again with Bessy’s sterile pain. She stood staring before her for a moment—then her eyes fell on Amherst’s letter, which had fluttered to the floor between them. The fatal letter! If it had not come at that unlucky moment perhaps she might still have gained her end…. She picked it up and re-read it. Yes—there were phrases in it that a wounded suspicious heart might misconstrue…. Yet Bessy’s last words had absolved her…. Why had she not answered them? Why had she stood there dumb? The blow to her pride had been too deep, had been dealt too unexpectedly—for one miserable moment she had thought first of herself! Ah, that importunate, irrepressible self—the moi haissable of the Christian—if only one could tear it from one’s breast! She had missed an opportunity—her last opportunity perhaps! By this time, even, a hundred hostile influences, cold whispers of vanity, of selfishness, of worldly pride, might have drawn their freezing ring about Bessy’s heart….

Justine started up to follow her…then paused, recalling her last words. “Let us not talk now—I can’t!” She had no right to intrude on that bleeding privacy—if the chance had been hers she had lost it. She dropped back into her seat at the desk, hiding her face in her hands.

Presently she heard the clock strike, and true to her tireless instinct of activity, she lifted her head, took up her pen, and went on with the correspondence she had dropped…. It was hard at first to collect her thoughts, or even to summon to her pen the conventional phrases that sufficed for most of the notes. Groping for a word, she pushed aside her writing and stared out at the sallow frozen landscape framed by the window at which she sat. The sleet had ceased, and hollows of sunless blue showed through the driving wind-clouds. A hard sky and a hard ground— frost-bound ringing earth under rigid ice-mailed trees.

As Justine looked out, shivering a little, she saw a woman’s figure riding down the avenue toward the gate. The figure disappeared behind a clump of evergreens—showed again farther down, through the boughs of a skeleton beech—and revealed itself in the next open space as Bessy—Bessy in the saddle on a day of glaring frost, when no horse could keep his footing out of a walk!

Justine went to the window and strained her eyes for a confirming glimpse. Yes—it was Bessy! There was no mistaking that light flexible figure, every line swaying true to the beat of the horse’s stride. But Justine remembered that Bessy had not meant to ride—had countermanded her horse because of the bad going…. Well, she was a perfect horsewoman and had no doubt chosen her surest-footed mount…probably the brown cob, Tony Lumpkin.

But when did Tony’s sides shine so bright through the leafless branches? And when did he sweep his rider on with such long free play of the hind-quarters? Horse and rider shot into sight again, rounding the curve of the avenue near the gates, and in a break of sunlight Justine saw the glitter of chestnut flanks—and remembered that Impulse was the only chestnut in the stables….

 

She went back to her seat and continued writing. Bessy had left a formidable heap of bills and letters; and when this was demolished, Justine had her own correspondence to despatch. She had heard that morning from the matron of Saint Elizabeth’s: an interesting “case” was offered her, but she must come within two days. For the first few hours she had wavered, loath to leave Lynbrook without some definite light on her friend’s future; but now Amherst’s letter had shed that light—or rather, had deepened the obscurity—and she had no pretext for lingering on where her uselessness had been so amply demonstrated.

She wrote to the matron accepting the engagement; and the acceptance involved the writing of other letters, the general reorganizing of that minute polity, the life of Justine Brent. She smiled a little to think how easily she could be displaced and transplanted—how slender were her material impedimenta, how few her invisible bonds! She was as light and detachable as a dead leaf on the autumn breeze—yet she was in the season of sap and flower, when there is life and song in the trees!

But she did not think long of herself, for an undefinable anxiety ran through her thoughts like a black thread. It found expression, now and then, in the long glances she threw through the window—in her rising to consult the clock and compare her watch with it—in a nervous snatch of humming as she paced the room once or twice before going back to her desk….

Why was Bessy so late? Dusk was falling already—the early end of the cold slate-hued day. But Bessy always rode late—there was always a rational answer to Justine’s irrational conjectures…. It was the sight of those chestnut flanks that tormented her—she knew of Bessy’s previous struggles with the mare. But the indulging of idle apprehensions was not in her nature, and when the tea-tray came, and with it Cicely, sparkling from a gusty walk, and coral-pink in her cloud of crinkled hair, Justine sprang up and cast off her cares.