Well—it had to be spoken! “Did Mrs. Amherst receive my telephone message?”
“Yes, sir. I gave it to her myself.”
It occurred confusedly to Amherst that a well-bred man—as Lynbrook understood the phrase—would, at this point, have made some tardy feint of being in his wife’s confidence, of having, on second thoughts, no reason to be surprised at her departure. It was humiliating, he supposed, to be thus laying bare his discomfiture to his dependents—he could see that even Knowles was affected by the manifest impropriety of the situation—but no pretext presented itself to his mind, and after another interval of silence he turned slowly toward the door of the smoking-room.
“My letters are here, I suppose?” he paused on the threshold to enquire; and on the butler’s answering in the affirmative, he said to himself, with a last effort to suspend his judgment: “She has left a line—there will be some explanation–-“
But there was nothing—neither word nor message; nothing but the reverberating retort of her departure in the face of his return—her flight to Blanche Carbury as the final answer to his final appeal.
XXIII
JUSTINE was coming back to Lynbrook. She had been, after all, unable to stay out the ten days of her visit: the undefinable sense of being needed, so often the determining motive of her actions, drew her back to Long Island at the end of the week. She had received no word from Amherst or Bessy; only Cicely had told her, in a big round hand, that mother had been away three days, and that it had been very lonely, and that the housekeeper’s cat had kittens, and she was to have one; and were kittens christened, or how did they get their names?—because she wanted to call hers Justine; and she had found in her book a bird like the one father had shown them in the swamp; and they were not alone now, because the Telfers were there, and they had all been out sleighing; but it would be much nicer when Justine came back….
It was as difficult to extract any sequence of facts from Cicely’s letter as from an early chronicle. She made no reference to Amherst’s return, which was odd, since she was fond of her step-father, yet not significant, since the fact of his arrival might have been crowded out by the birth of the kittens, or some incident equally prominent in her perspectiveless grouping of events; nor did she name the date of her mother’s departure, so that Justine could not guess whether it had been contingent on Amherst’s return, or wholly unconnected with it. What puzzled her most was Bessy’s own silence—yet that too, in a sense, was reassuring, for Bessy thought of others chiefly when it was painful to think of herself, and her not writing implied that she had felt no present need of her friend’s sympathy.
Justine did not expect to find Amherst at Lynbrook. She had felt convinced, when they parted, that he would persist in his plan of going south; and the fact that the Telfer girls were again in possession made it seem probable that he had already left. Under the circumstances, Justine thought the separation advisable; but she was eager to be assured that it had been effected amicably, and without open affront to Bessy’s pride.
She arrived on a Saturday afternoon, and when she entered the house the sound of voices from the drawing-room, and the prevailing sense of bustle and movement amid which her own coming was evidently an unconsidered detail, showed that the normal life of Lynbrook had resumed its course. The Telfers, as usual, had brought a lively throng in their train; and amid the bursts of merriment about the drawing-room tea-table she caught Westy Gaines’s impressive accents, and the screaming laughter of Blanche Carbury….
So Blanche Carbury was back at Lynbrook! The discovery gave Justine fresh cause for conjecture. Whatever reciprocal concessions might have resulted from Amherst’s return to his wife, it seemed hardly probable that they included a renewal of relations with Mrs. Carbury. Had his mission failed then—had he and Bessy parted in anger, and was Mrs. Carbury’s presence at Lynbrook Bessy’s retort to his assertion of independence?
In the school-room, where Justine was received with the eager outpouring of Cicely’s minutest experiences, she dared not put the question that would have solved these doubts; and she left to dress for dinner without knowing whether Amherst had returned to Lynbrook. Yet in her heart she never questioned that he had done so; all her fears revolved about what had since taken place.
She saw Bessy first in the drawing-room, surrounded by her guests; and their brief embrace told her nothing, except that she had never beheld her friend more brilliant, more triumphantly in possession of recovered spirits and health.
That Amherst was absent was now made evident by Bessy’s requesting Westy Gaines to lead the way to the dining-room with Mrs. Ansell, who was one of the reassembled visitors; and the only one, as Justine presently observed, not in key with the prevailing gaiety. Mrs. Ansell, usually so tinged with the colours of her environment, preserved on this occasion a grey neutrality of tone which was the only break in the general brightness. It was not in her graceful person to express anything as gross as disapproval, yet that sentiment was manifest, to the nice observer, in a delicate aloofness which made the waves of laughter fall back from her, and spread a circle of cloudy calm about her end of the table. Justine had never been greatly drawn to Mrs. Ansell. Her own adaptability was not in the least akin to the older woman’s studied self-effacement; and the independence of judgment which Justine preserved in spite of her perception of divergent standpoints made her a little contemptuous of an excess of charity that seemed to have been acquired at the cost of all individual convictions. Tonight for the first time she felt in Mrs. Ansell a secret sympathy with her own fears; and a sense of this tacit understanding made her examine with sudden interest the face of her unexpected ally…. After all, what did she know of Mrs. Ansell’s history—of the hidden processes which had gradually subdued her own passions and desires, making of her, as it were, a mere decorative background, a connecting link between other personalities? Perhaps, for a woman alone in the world, without the power and opportunity that money gives, there was no alternative between letting one’s individuality harden into a small dry nucleus of egoism, or diffuse itself thus in the interstices of other lives—and there fell upon Justine the chill thought that just such a future might await her if she missed the liberating gift of personal happiness….
Neither that night nor the next day had she a private word with Bessy—and it became evident, as the hours passed, that Mrs. Amherst was deliberately postponing the moment when they should find themselves alone. But the Lynbrook party was to disperse on the Monday; and Bessy, who hated early rising, and all the details of housekeeping, tapped at Justine’s door late on Sunday night to ask her to speed the departing visitors.
She pleaded this necessity as an excuse for her intrusion, and the playful haste of her manner showed a nervous shrinking from any renewal of confidence; but as she leaned in the doorway, fingering the diamond chain about her neck, while one satin-tipped foot emerged restlessly from the edge of her lace gown, her face lost the bloom of animation which talk and laughter always produced in it, and she looked so pale and weary that Justine needed no better pretext for drawing her into the room.
It was not in Bessy to resist a soothing touch in her moments of nervous reaction. She sank into the chair by the fire and let her head rest wearily against the cushion which Justine slipped behind it.