“You trusted my judgment not long ago,” he went on, “when I asked you to give up seeing Mrs. Carbury–-“
She flushed, but with anger, not compunction. “It seems to me that should be a reason for your not asking me to make other sacrifices! When I gave up Blanche I thought you would see that I wanted to please you—and that you would do something for me in return….”
Amherst interrupted her with a laugh. “Thank you for telling me your real reasons. I was fool enough to think you acted from conviction—not that you were simply striking a bargain–-“
He broke off, and they looked at each other with a kind of fear, each hearing between them the echo of irreparable words. Amherst’s only clear feeling was that he must not speak again till he had beaten down the horrible sensation in his breast—the rage of hate which had him in its grip, and which made him almost afraid, while it lasted, to let his eyes rest on the fair weak creature before him. Bessy, too, was in the clutch of a mute anger which slowly poured its benumbing current around her heart. Strong waves of passion did not quicken her vitality: she grew inert and cold under their shock. Only one little pulse of self-pity continued to beat in her, trembling out at last on the cry: “Ah, I know it’s not because you care so much for Westmore—it’s only because you want to get away from me!”
Amherst stared as if her words had flashed a light into the darkest windings of his misery. “Yes—I want to get away…” he said; and he turned and walked out of the room.
He went down to the smoking-room, and ringing for a servant, ordered his horse to be saddled. The footman who answered his summons brought the afternoon’s mail, and Amherst, throwing himself down on the sofa, began to tear open his letters while he waited.
He ran through the first few without knowing what he read; but presently his attention was arrested by the hand-writing of a man he had known well in college, and who had lately come into possession of a large cotton-mill in the South. He wrote now to ask if Amherst could recommend a good manager—“not one of your old routine men, but a young fellow with the new ideas. Things have been in pretty bad shape down here,” the writer added, “and now that I’m in possession I want to see what can be done to civilize the place”; and he went on to urge that Amherst should come down himself to inspect the mills, and propose such improvements as his experience suggested. “We’ve all heard of the great things you’re doing at Westmore,” the letter ended; and Amherst cast it from him with a groan….
It was Duplain’s chance, of course…that was his first thought. He took up the letter and read it over. He knew the man who wrote—no sentimentalist seeking emotional variety from vague philanthropic experiments, but a serious student of social conditions, now unexpectedly provided with the opportunity to apply his ideas. Yes, it was Duplain’s chance—if indeed it might not be his own!… Amherst sat upright, dazzled by the thought. Why Duplain—why not himself? Bessy had spoken the illuminating word—what he wanted was to get away—to get away at any cost! Escape had become his one thought: escape from the bondage of Lynbrook, from the bitter memory of his failure at Westmore; and here was the chance to escape back into life—into independence, activity and usefulness! Every atrophied faculty in him suddenly started from its torpor, and his brain throbbed with the pain of the awakening…. The servant came to tell him that his horse waited, and he sprang up, took his riding-whip from the rack, stared a moment, absently, after the man’s retreating back, and then dropped down again on the sofa….
What was there to keep him from accepting? His wife’s affection was dead—if her sentimental fancy for him had ever deserved the name! And his passing mastery over her was gone too—he smiled to remember that, hardly two hours earlier, he had been fatuous enough to think he could still regain it! Now he said to himself that she would sooner desert a friend to please him than sacrifice a fraction of her income; and the discovery cast a stain of sordidness on their whole relation. He could still imagine struggling to win her back from another man, or even to save her from some folly into which mistaken judgment or perverted enthusiasm might have hurried her; but to go on battling against the dull unimaginative subservience to personal luxury—the slavery to houses and servants and clothes—ah, no, while he had any fight left in him it was worth spending in a better cause than that!
Through the open window he could hear, in the mild December stillness, his horse’s feet coming and going on the gravel. Her horse, led up and down by her servant, at the door of her house!… The sound symbolized his whole future…the situation his marriage had made for him, and to which he must henceforth bend, unless he broke with it then and there…. He tried to look ahead, to follow up, one by one, the consequences of such a break. That it would be final he had no doubt. There are natures which seem to be drawn closer by dissension, to depend, for the renewal of understanding, on the spark of generosity and compunction that anger strikes out of both; but Amherst knew that between himself and his wife no such clearing of the moral atmosphere was possible. The indignation which left him with tingling nerves and a burning need of some immediate escape into action, crystallized in Bessy into a hard kernel of obstinacy, into which, after each fresh collision, he felt that a little more of herself had been absorbed…. No, the break between them would be final—if he went now he would not come back. And it flashed across him that this solution might have been foreseen by his wife—might even have been deliberately planned and led up to by those about her. His father-in-law had never liked him—the disturbing waves of his activity had rippled even the sheltered surface of Mr. Langhope’s existence. He must have been horribly in their way! Well—it was not too late to take himself out of it. In Bessy’s circle the severing of such ties was regarded as an expensive but unhazardous piece of surgery—nobody bled to death of the wound…. The footman came back to remind him that his horse was waiting, and Amherst rose to his feet.
“Send him back to the stable,” he said with a glance at his watch, “and order a trap to take me to the next train.” XXII
WHEN Amherst woke, the next morning, in the hotel to which he had gone up from Lynbrook, he was oppressed by the sense that the hardest step he had to take still lay before him. It had been almost easy to decide that the moment of separation had come, for circumstances seemed to have closed every other issue from his unhappy situation; but how tell his wife of his decision? Amherst, to whom action was the first necessity of being, became a weak procrastinator when he was confronted by the need of writing instead of speaking.
To account for his abrupt departure from Lynbrook he had left word that he was called to town on business; but, since he did not mean to return, some farther explanation was now necessary, and he was paralyzed by the difficulty of writing. He had already telegraphed to his friend that he would be at the mills the next day; but the southern express did not leave till the afternoon, and he still had several hours in which to consider what he should say to his wife. To postpone the dreaded task, he invented the pretext of some business to be despatched, and taking the Subway to Wall Street consumed the morning in futile activities. But since the renunciation of his work at Westmore he had no active concern with the financial world, and by twelve o’clock he had exhausted his imaginary affairs and was journeying up town again. He left the train at Union Square, and walked along Fourth Avenue, now definitely resolved to go back to the hotel and write his letter before lunching.