Mr. Tredegar, to his client’s surprise, answered the appeal in person. He had not been lately to Lynbrook, dreading the cold and damp of the country in winter; and his sudden arrival had therefore an ominous significance.
He came for an evening in mid-week, when even Blanche Carbury was absent, and Bessy and Justine had the house to themselves. Mrs. Ansell had sailed the week before with her invalid cousin. No farther words had passed between herself and Justine—but the latter was conscious that their talk had increased instead of lessened the distance between them. Justine herself meant to leave soon. Her hope of regaining Bessy’s confidence had been deceived, and seeing herself definitely superseded, she chafed anew at her purposeless inactivity. She had already written to one or two doctors in New York, and to the matron of Saint Elizabeth’s. She had made herself a name in surgical cases, and it could not be long before a summons came….
Meanwhile Mr. Tredegar arrived, and the three dined together, the two women bending meekly to his discourse, which was never more oracular and authoritative than when delivered to the gentler sex alone. Amherst’s absence, in particular, seemed to loose the thin current of Mr. Tredegar’s eloquence. He was never quite at ease in the presence of an independent mind, and Justine often reflected that, even had the two men known nothing of each other’s views, there would have been between them an instinctive and irreducible hostility—they would have disliked each other if they had merely jostled elbows in the street.
Yet even freed from Amherst’s presence Mr. Tredegar showed a darkling brow, and as Justine slipped away after dinner she felt that she left Bessy to something more serious than the usual business conference.
How serious, she was to learn that very night, when, in the small hours, her friend burst in on her tearfully. Bessy was ruined—ruined—that was what Mr. Tredegar had come to tell her! She might have known he would not have travelled to Lynbrook for a trifle…. She had expected to find herself cramped, restricted—to be warned that she must “manage,” hateful word!… But this! This was incredible! Unendurable! There was no money to build the gymnasium—none at all! And all because it had been swallowed up at Westmore—because the ridiculous changes there, the changes that nobody wanted, nobody approved of—that Truscomb and all the other experts had opposed and derided from the first—these changes, even modified and arrested, had already involved so much of her income, that it might be years—yes, he said years!—before she would feel herself free again—free of her own fortune, of Cicely’s fortune…of the money poor Dick Westmore had meant his wife and child to enjoy!
Justine listened anxiously to this confused outpouring of resentments. Bessy’s born incapacity for figures made it indeed possible that the facts came on her as a surprise—that she had quite forgotten the temporary reduction of her income, and had begun to imagine that what she had saved in one direction was hers to spend in another. All this was conceivable. But why had Mr. Tredegar drawn so dark a picture of the future? Or was it only that, thwarted of her immediate desire, Bessy’s disappointment blackened the farthest verge of her horizon? Justine, though aware of her friend’s lack of perspective, suspected that a conniving hand had helped to throw the prospect out of drawing….
Could it be possible, then, that Mr. Tredegar was among those who desired a divorce? That the influences at which Mrs. Ansell had hinted proceeded not only from Blanche Carbury and her group? Helpless amid this rush of forebodings, Justine could do no more than soothe and restrain—to reason would have been idle. She had never till now realized how completely she had lost ground with Bessy.
“The humiliation—before my friends! Oh, I was warned…my father, every one…for Cicely’s sake I was warned…but I wouldn’t listen—and now! From the first it was all he cared for—in Europe, even, he was always dragging me to factories. Me?—I was only the owner of Westmore! He wanted power—power, that’s all—when he lost it he left me…oh, I’m glad now my baby is dead! Glad there’s nothing between us—nothing, nothing in the world to tie us together any longer!”
The disproportion between this violent grief and its trivial cause would have struck Justine as simply grotesque, had she not understood that the incident of the gymnasium, which followed with cumulative pressure on a series of similar episodes, seemed to Bessy like the reaching out of a retaliatory hand—a mocking reminder that she was still imprisoned in the consequences of her unhappy marriage.
Such folly seemed past weeping for—it froze Justine’s compassion into disdain, till she remembered that the sources of our sorrow are sometimes nobler than their means of expression, and that a baffled unappeased love was perhaps the real cause of Bessy’s anger against her husband.
At any rate, the moment was a critical one, and Justine remembered with a pang that Mrs. Ansell had foreseen such a contingency, and implored her to take measures against it. She had refused, from a sincere dread of precipitating a definite estrangement—but had she been right in judging the situation so logically? With a creature of Bessy’s emotional uncertainties the result of contending influences was really incalculable—it might still be that, at this juncture, Amherst’s return would bring about a reaction of better feelings….
Justine sat and mused on these things after leaving her friend exhausted upon a tearful pillow. She felt that she had perhaps taken too large a survey of the situation—that the question whether there could ever be happiness between this tormented pair was not one to concern those who struggled for their welfare. Most marriages are a patchwork of jarring tastes and ill-assorted ambitions—if here and there, for a moment, two colours blend, two textures are the same, so much the better for the pattern! Justine, certainly, could foresee in reunion no positive happiness for either of her friends; but she saw positive disaster for Bessy in separation from her husband….
Suddenly she rose from her chair by the falling fire, and crossed over to the writing-table. She would write to Amherst herself—she would tell him to come. The decision once reached, hope flowed back to her heart—the joy of action so often deceived her into immediate faith in its results!
“Dear Mr. Amherst,” she wrote, “the last time I saw you, you told me you would remember what I said. I ask you to do so now—to remember that I urged you not to be away too long. I believe you ought to come back now, though I know Bessy will not ask you to. I am writing without her knowledge, but with the conviction that she needs you, though perhaps without knowing it herself….”
She paused, and laid down her pen. Why did it make her so happy to write to him? Was it merely the sense of recovered helpfulness, or something warmer, more personal, that made it a joy to trace his name, and to remind him of their last intimate exchange of words? Well—perhaps it was that too. There were moments when she was so mortally lonely that any sympathetic contact with another life sent a glow into her veins—that she was thankful to warm herself at any fire.
XXV
BESSY, languidly glancing through her midday mail some five days later, uttered a slight exclamation as she withdrew her finger-tip from the flap of the envelope she had begun to open.
It was a black sleety day, with an east wind bowing the trees beyond the drenched window-panes, and the two friends, after luncheon, had withdrawn to the library, where Justine sat writing notes for Bessy, while the latter lay back in her armchair, in the state of dreamy listlessness into which she always sank when not under the stimulus of amusement or exercise.