Mrs. Ansell looked up with a quick exclamation. "Let slip? Isn"t it much more likely that she forced it on you--emphasized it to the last limit of credulity?" She sank her hands to the arms of the chair, and exclaimed, looking him straight in the eyes: "You say she was frightened? It strikes me she was dauntless!"
Mr. Langhope stared a moment; then he said, with an ironic shrug: "No doubt, then, she counted on its striking me too."
Mrs. Ansell breathed a shuddering sigh. "Oh, I understand your feeling as you do--I"m deep in the horror of it myself. But I can"t help seeing that this woman might have saved herself--and that she"s chosen to save her husband instead. What I don"t see, from what I know of him," she musingly proceeded, "is how, on any imaginable pretext, she will induce him to accept the sacrifice."
Mr. Langhope made a resentful movement. "If that"s the only point your mind dwells on----!"
Mrs. Ansell looked up. "It doesn"t dwell anywhere as yet--except, my poor Henry," she murmured, rising to move toward him, and softly laying her hand on his bent shoulder--"except on your distress and misery--on the very part I can"t yet talk of, can"t question you about...."
He let her hand rest there a moment; then he turned, and drawing it into his own tremulous fingers, pressed it silently, with a clinging helpless grasp that drew the tears to her eyes.
Justine Brent, in her earliest girlhood, had gone through one of those emotional experiences that are the infantile diseases of the heart. She had fancied herself beloved of a youth of her own age; had secretly returned his devotion, and had seen it reft from her by another. Such an incident, as inevitable as the measles, sometimes, like that mild malady, leaves traces out of all proportion to its actual virulence. The blow fell on Justine with tragic suddenness, and she reeled under it, thinking darkly of death, and renouncing all hopes of future happiness.
Her ready pen often beguiled her into recording her impressions, and she now found an escape from despair in writing the history of a damsel similarly wronged. In her tale, the heroine killed herself; but the author, saved by this vicarious sacrifice, lived, and in time even smiled over her ma.n.u.script.
It was many years since Justine Amherst had recalled this youthful incident; but the memory of it recurred to her as she turned from Mr.
Langhope"s door. For a moment death seemed the easiest escape from what confronted her; but though she could no longer medicine her despair by turning it into fiction, she knew at once that she must somehow transpose it into terms of action, that she must always escape from life into more life, and not into its negation.
She had been carried into Mr. Langhope"s presence by that expiatory pa.s.sion which still burns so high, and draws its sustenance from so deep down, in the unsleeping hearts of women. Though she had never wavered in her conviction that her act had been justified her ideas staggered under the sudden comprehension of its consequences. Not till that morning had she seen those consequences in their terrible, unsuspected extent, had she understood how one stone rashly loosened from the laboriously erected structure of human society may produce remote fissures in that clumsy fabric. She saw that, having hazarded the loosening of the stone, she should have held herself apart from ordinary human ties, like some priestess set apart for the service of the temple. And instead, she had seized happiness with both hands, taken it as the gift of the very fate she had herself precipitated! She remembered some old Greek saying to the effect that the G.o.ds never forgive the mortal who presumes to love and suffer like a G.o.d. She had dared to do both, and the G.o.ds were bringing ruin on that deeper self which had its life in those about her.
So much had become clear to her when she heard Amherst declare his intention of laying the facts before Mr. Langhope. His few broken words lit up the farthest verge of their lives. She saw that his retrospective reverence for his wife"s memory, which was far as possible removed from the strong pa.s.sion of the mind and senses that bound him to herself, was indelibly stained and desecrated by the discovery that all he had received from the one woman had been won for him by the deliberate act of the other. This was what no reasoning, no appeal to the calmer judgment, could ever, in his inmost thoughts, undo or extenuate. It could find appeas.e.m.e.nt only in the renunciation of all that had come to him from Bessy; and this renunciation, so different from the mere sacrifice of material well-being, was bound up with consequences so far-reaching, so destructive to the cause which had inspired his whole life, that Justine felt the helpless terror of the mortal who has launched one of the heavenly bolts.
She could think of no way of diverting it but the way she had chosen.
She must see Mr. Langhope first, must clear Amherst of the least faint a.s.sociation with her act or her intention. And to do this she must exaggerate, not her own compunction--for she could not depart from the exact truth in reporting her feelings and convictions--but her husband"s first instinctive movement of horror, the revulsion of feeling her confession had really produced in him. This was the most painful part of her task, and for this reason her excited imagination clothed it with a special expiatory value. If she could purchase Amherst"s peace of mind, and the security of his future, by confessing, and even over-emphasizing, the momentary estrangement between them there would be a bitter joy in such payment!
Her hour with Mr. Langhope proved the correctness of her intuition. She could save Amherst only by effacing herself from his life: those about him would be only too ready to let her bear the full burden of obloquy.
She could see that, for a dozen reasons, Mr. Langhope, even in the first shock of his dismay, unconsciously craved a way of exonerating Amherst, of preserving intact the relation on which so much of his comfort had come to depend. And she had the courage to make the most of his desire, to fortify it by isolating Amherst"s point of view from hers; so that, when the hour was over, she had the solace of feeling that she had completely freed him from any conceivable consequence of her act.
So far, the impetus of self-sacrifice had carried her straight to her goal; but, as frequently happens with such atoning impulses, it left her stranded just short of any subsequent plan of conduct. Her next step, indeed, was clear enough: she must return to Hanaford, explain to her husband that she had felt impelled to tell her own story to Mr.
Langhope, and then take up her ordinary life till chance offered her a pretext for fulfilling her promise. But what pretext was likely to present itself? No symbolic horn would sound the hour of fulfillment; she must be her own judge, and hear the call in the depths of her own conscience.
x.x.xIX
WHEN Amherst, returning late that afternoon from Westmore, learned of his wife"s departure, and read the note she had left, he found it, for a time, impossible to bring order out of the confusion of feeling produced in him.
His mind had been disturbed enough before. All day, through the routine of work at the mills, he had laboured inwardly with the difficulties confronting him; and his unrest had been increased by the fact that his situation bore an ironic likeness to that in which, from a far different cause, he had found himself at the other crisis of his life. Once more he was threatened with the possibility of having to give up Westmore, at a moment when concentration of purpose and persistency of will were at last beginning to declare themselves in tangible results. Before, he had only given up dreams; now it was their fruition that he was asked to surrender. And he was fixed in his resolve to withdraw absolutely from Westmore if the statement he had to make to Mr. Langhope was received with the least hint of an offensive mental reservation. All forms of moral compromise had always been difficult to Amherst, and like many men absorbed in large and complicated questions he craved above all clearness and peace in his household relation. The first months of his second marriage had brought him, as a part of richer and deeper joys, this enveloping sense of a clear moral medium, in which no subterfuge or equivocation could draw breath. He had felt that henceforth he could pour into his work all the combative energy, the powers of endurance, resistance, renovation, which had once been unprofitably dissipated in the vain attempt to bring some sort of harmony into life with Bessy.
Between himself and Justine, apart from their love for each other, there was the wider pa.s.sion for their kind, which gave back to them an enlarged and deepened reflection of their personal feeling. In such an air it had seemed that no petty egotism could hamper their growth, no misintelligence obscure their love; yet all the while this pure happiness had been unfolding against a sordid background of falsehood and intrigue from which his soul turned with loathing.
Justine was right in a.s.suming that Amherst had never thought much about women. He had vaguely regarded them as meant to people that hazy domain of feeling designed to offer the busy man an escape from thought. His second marriage, leading him to the blissful discovery that woman can think as well as feel, that there are beings of the ornamental s.e.x in whom brain and heart have so enlarged each other that their emotions are as clear as thought, their thoughts as warm as emotions--this discovery had had the effect of making him discard his former summary conception of woman as a bundle of inconsequent impulses, and admit her at a stroke to full mental equality with her lord. The result of this act of manumission was, that in judging Justine he could no longer allow for what was purely feminine in her conduct. It was incomprehensible to him that she, to whom truth had seemed the essential element of life, should have been able to draw breath, and find happiness, in an atmosphere of falsehood and dissimulation. His mind could a.s.sent--at least in the abstract--to the reasonableness of her act; but he was still unable to understand her having concealed it from him. He could enter far enough into her feelings to allow for her having kept silence on his first return to Lynbrook, when she was still under the strain of a prolonged and terrible trial; but that she should have continued to do so when he and she had discovered and confessed their love for each other, threw an intolerable doubt on her whole course.
He stayed late at the mills, finding one pretext after another for delaying his return to Hanaford, and trying, while he gave one part of his mind to the methodical performance of his task, to adjust the other to some definite view of the future. But all was darkened and confused by the sense that, between himself and Justine, complete communion of thought was no longer possible. It had, in fact, never existed; there had always been a locked chamber in her mind, and he knew not yet what other secrets might inhabit it.
The shock of finding her gone when he reached home gave a new turn to his feelings. She had made no mystery of her destination, leaving word with the servants that she had gone to town to see Mr. Langhope; and Amherst found a note from her on his study table.
"I feel," she wrote, "that I ought to see Mr. Langhope myself, and be the first to tell him what must be told. It was like you, dearest, to wish to spare me this, but it would have made me more unhappy; and Mr.
Langhope might wish to hear the facts in my own words. I shall come back tomorrow, and after that it will be for you to decide what must be done."
The brevity and simplicity of the note were characteristic; in moments of high tension Justine was always calm and direct. And it was like her, too, not to make any covert appeal to his sympathy, not to seek to entrap his judgment by caressing words and plaintive allusions. The quiet tone in which she stated her purpose matched the firmness and courage of the act, and for a moment Amherst was shaken by a revulsion of feeling. Her heart was level with his, after all--if she had done wrong she would bear the brunt of it alone. It was so exactly what he himself would have felt and done in such a situation that faith in her flowed back through all the dried channels of his heart. But an instant later the current set the other way. The wretched years of his first marriage had left in him a residue of distrust, a tendency to dissociate every act from its ostensible motive. He had been too profoundly the dupe of his own enthusiasm not to retain this streak of scepticism, and it now moved him to ask if Justine"s sudden departure had not been prompted by some other cause than the one she avowed. Had that alone actuated her, why not have told it to him, and asked his consent to her plan? Why let him leave the house without a hint of her purpose, and slip off by the first train as soon as he was safe at Westmore? Might it not be that she had special reasons for wishing Mr. Langhope to _hear her own version first_--that there were questions she wished to parry herself, explanations she could trust no one to make for her? The thought plunged Amherst into deeper misery. He knew not how to defend himself against these disintegrating suspicions--he felt only that, once the accord between two minds is broken, it is less easy to restore than the pa.s.sion between two hearts. He dragged heavily through his solitary evening, and awaited with dread and yet impatience a message announcing his wife"s return.
It would have been easier--far easier--when she left Mr. Langhope"s door, to go straight out into the darkness and let it close in on her for good.
Justine felt herself yielding to the spell of that suggestion as she walked along the lamplit pavement, hardly conscious of the turn her steps were taking. The door of the house which a few weeks before had been virtually hers had closed on her without a question. She had been suffered to go out into the darkness without being asked whither she was going, or under what roof her night would be spent. The contrast between her past and present sounded through the tumult of her thoughts like the evil laughter of temptation. The house at Hanaford, to which she was returning, would look at her with the same alien face--nowhere on earth, at that moment, was a door which would open to her like the door of home.
In her painful self-absorption she followed the side street toward Madison Avenue, and struck southward down that tranquil thoroughfare.
There was a physical relief in rapid motion, and she walked on, still hardly aware of her direction, toward the cl.u.s.tered lights of Madison Square. Should she return to Hanaford, she had still several hours to dispose of before the departure of the midnight train; and if she did not return, hours and dates no longer existed for her.
It would be easier--infinitely easier--not to go back. To take up her life with Amherst would, under any circ.u.mstances, be painful enough; to take it up under the tacit restriction of her pledge to Mr. Langhope seemed more than human courage could face. As she approached the square she had almost reached the conclusion that such a temporary renewal was beyond her strength--beyond what any standard of duty exacted. The question of an alternative hardly troubled her. She would simply go on living, and find an escape in work and material hardship. It would not be hard for so inconspicuous a person to slip back into the obscure ma.s.s of humanity.
She paused a moment on the edge of the square, vaguely seeking a direction for her feet that might permit the working of her thoughts to go on uninterrupted; and as she stood there, her eyes fell on the bench near the corner of Twenty-sixth Street, where she had sat with Amherst on the day of his flight from Lynbrook. He too had dreamed of escaping from insoluble problems into the clear air of hard work and simple duties; and she remembered the words with which she had turned him back.
The cases, of course, were not identical, since he had been flying in anger and wounded pride from a situation for which he was in no wise to blame; yet, if even at such a moment she had insisted on charity and forbearance, how could she now show less self-denial than she had exacted of him?
"If you go away for a time, surely it ought to be in such a way that your going does not seem to cast any reflection on Bessy...." That was how she had put it to him, and how, with the mere change of a name, she must now, for reasons as cogent, put it to herself. It was just as much a part of the course she had planned to return to her husband now, and take up their daily life together, as it would, later on, be her duty to drop out of that life, when her doing so could no longer involve him in the penalty to be paid.
She stood a little while looking at the bench on which they had sat, and giving thanks in her heart for the past strength which was now helping to build up her failing courage: such a patchwork business are our best endeavours, yet so faithfully does each weak upward impulse reach back a hand to the next.
Justine"s explanation of her visit to Mr. Langhope was not wholly satisfying to her husband. She did not conceal from him that the scene had been painful, but she gave him to understand, as briefly as possible, that Mr. Langhope, after his first movement of uncontrollable distress, had seemed able to make allowances for the pressure under which she had acted, and that he had, at any rate, given no sign of intending to let her confession make any change in the relation between the households. If she did not--as Amherst afterward recalled--put all this specifically into words, she contrived to convey it in her manner, in her allusions, above all in her recovered composure. She had the demeanour of one who has gone through a severe test of strength, but come out of it in complete control of the situation. There was something slightly unnatural in this prompt solution of so complicated a difficulty, and it had the effect of making Amherst ask himself what, to produce such a result, must have been the gist of her communication to Mr. Langhope. If the latter had shown any disposition to be cruel, or even unjust, Amherst"s sympathies would have rushed instantly to his wife"s defence; but the fact that there was apparently to be no call on them left his reason free to compare and discriminate, with the final result that the more he pondered on his father-in-law"s att.i.tude the less intelligible it became.
A few days after Justine"s return he was called to New York on business; and before leaving he told her that he should of course take the opportunity of having a talk with Mr. Langhope.
She received the statement with the gentle composure from which she had not departed since her return from town; and he added tentatively, as if to provoke her to a clearer expression of feeling: "I shall not be satisfied, of course, till I see for myself just how he feels--just how much, at bottom, this has affected him--since my own future relation to him will, as I have already told you, depend entirely on his treatment of you."
She met this without any sign of disturbance. "His treatment of me was very kind," she said. "But would it not, on your part," she continued hesitatingly, "be kinder not to touch on the subject so soon again?"
The line deepened between his brows. "Touch on it? I sha"n"t rest till I"ve gone to the bottom of it! Till then, you must understand," he summed up with decision, "I feel myself only on sufferance here at Westmore."
"Yes--I understand," she a.s.sented; and as he bent over to kiss her for goodbye a tenuous impenetrable barrier seemed to lie between their lips.
It was Justine"s turn to await with a pa.s.sionate anxiety her husband"s home-coming; and when, on the third day, he reappeared, her dearly acquired self-control gave way to a tremulous eagerness. This was, after all, the turning-point in their lives: everything depended on how Mr.
Langhope had "played up" to his cue; had kept to his side of their bond.
Amherst"s face showed signs of emotional havoc: when feeling once broke out in him it had full play, and she could see that his hour with Mr.
Langhope had struck to the roots of life. But the resultant expression was one of invigoration, not defeat; and she gathered at a glance that her partner had not betrayed her. She drew a tragic solace from the success of her achievement; yet it flung her into her husband"s arms with a pa.s.sion of longing to which, as she instantly felt, he did not as completely respond.
There was still, then, something "between" them: somewhere the mechanism of her scheme had failed, or its action had not produced the result she had counted on.
As soon as they were alone in the study she said, as quietly as she could: "You saw your father-in-law? You talked with him?"