<h2><SPAN name="XXIV" id="XXIV"></SPAN>XXIV</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Justine</span> was pacing the long library at Lynbrook,
between the caged sets of standard authors.</p>
<p>She felt as much caged as they: as much a part of a
conventional stage-setting totally unrelated to the
action going on before it. Two weeks had passed<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_354" id="Page_354"></SPAN></span>
since her return from Philadelphia; and during that
time she had learned that her usefulness at Lynbrook
was over. Though not unwelcome, she might almost
call herself unwanted; life swept by, leaving her tethered
to the stake of inaction; a bitter lot for one who
chose to measure existence by deeds instead of days.
She had found Bessy ostensibly busy with a succession
of guests; no one in the house needed her but Cicely,
and even Cicely, at times, was caught up into the
whirl of her mother's life, swept off on sleighing parties
and motor-trips, or carried to town for a dancing-class
or an opera matinée.</p>
<p>Mrs. Fenton Carbury was not among the visitors
who left Lynbrook on the Monday after Justine's return.</p>
<p>Mr. Carbury, with the other bread-winners of the
party, had hastened back to his treadmill in Wall Street
after a Sunday spent in silently studying the files of the
Financial Record; but his wife stayed on, somewhat
aggressively in possession, criticizing and rearranging
the furniture, ringing for the servants, making sudden
demands on the stable, telegraphing, telephoning, ordering
fires lighted or windows opened, and leaving
everywhere in her wake a trail of cigarette ashes and
cocktail glasses.</p>
<p>Ned Bowfort had not been included in the house-party;
but on the day of its dispersal he rode over unannounced
for luncheon, put up his horse in the stable,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_355" id="Page_355"></SPAN></span>
threaded his way familiarly among the dozing dogs in
the hall, greeted Mrs. Ansell and Justine with just the
right shade of quiet deference, produced from his
pocket a new puzzle-game for Cicely, and sat down
beside her mother with the quiet urbanity of the family
friend who knows his privileges but is too discreet to
abuse them.</p>
<p>After that he came every day, sometimes riding home
late to the Hunt Club, sometimes accompanying Bessy
and Mrs. Carbury to town for dinner and the theatre;
but always with his deprecating air of having dropped
in by accident, and modestly hoping that his intrusion
was not unwelcome.</p>
<p>The following Sunday brought another influx of
visitors, and Bessy seemed to fling herself with renewed
enthusiasm into the cares of hospitality. She had
avoided Justine since their midnight talk, contriving to
see her in Cicely's presence, or pleading haste when
they found themselves alone. The winter was unusually
open, and she spent long hours in the saddle
when her time was not taken up with her visitors. For
a while she took Cicely on her daily rides; but she
soon wearied of adapting her hunter's stride to the
pace of the little girl's pony, and Cicely was once more
given over to the coachman's care.</p>
<p>Then came snow and a long frost, and Bessy grew
restless at her imprisonment, and grumbled that there<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_356" id="Page_356"></SPAN></span>
was no way of keeping well in a winter climate which
made regular exercise impossible.</p>
<p>"Why not build a squash-court?" Blanche Carbury
proposed; and the two fell instantly to making plans
under the guidance of Ned Bowfort and Westy Gaines.
As the scheme developed, various advisers suggested
that it was a pity not to add a bowling-alley, a swimming-tank
and a gymnasium; a fashionable architect
was summoned from town, measurements were taken,
sites discussed, sketches compared, and engineers consulted
as to the cost of artesian wells and the best
system for heating the tank.</p>
<p>Bessy seemed filled with a feverish desire to carry
out the plan as quickly as possible, and on as large a
scale as even the architect's invention soared to; but
it was finally decided that, before signing the contracts,
she should run over to New Jersey to see a building of
the same kind on which a sporting friend of Mrs. Carbury's
had recently lavished a fortune.</p>
<p>It was on this errand that the two ladies, in company
with Westy Gaines and Bowfort, had departed on the
day which found Justine restlessly measuring the
length of the library. She and Mrs. Ansell had the
house to themselves; and it was hardly a surprise to
her when, in the course of the afternoon, Mrs. Ansell,
after a discreet pause on the threshold, advanced toward
her down the long room.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_357" id="Page_357"></SPAN></span></p>
<p>Since the night of her return Justine had felt sure
that Mrs. Ansell would speak; but the elder lady was
given to hawk-like circlings about her subject, to
hanging over it and contemplating it before her wings
dropped for the descent.</p>
<p>Now, however, it was plain that she had resolved to
strike; and Justine had a sense of relief at the thought.
She had been too long isolated in her anxiety, her powerlessness
to help; and she had a vague hope that Mrs.
Ansell's worldly wisdom might accomplish what her
inexperience had failed to achieve.</p>
<p>"Shall we sit by the fire? I am glad to find you
alone," Mrs. Ansell began, with the pleasant abruptness
that was one of the subtlest instruments of her
indirection; and as Justine acquiesced, she added,
yielding her slight lines to the luxurious depths of an
arm-chair: "I have been rather suddenly asked by an
invalid cousin to go to Europe with her next week, and
I can't go contentedly without being at peace about
our friends."</p>
<p>She paused, but Justine made no answer. In spite
of her growing sympathy for Mrs. Ansell she could not
overcome an inherent distrust, not of her methods, but
of her ultimate object. What, for instance, was her
conception of being at peace about the Amhersts?
Justine's own conviction was that, as far as their final
welfare was concerned, any terms were better between<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_358" id="Page_358"></SPAN></span>
them than the external harmony which had prevailed
during Amherst's stay at Lynbrook.</p>
<p>The subtle emanation of her distrust may have been
felt by Mrs. Ansell; for the latter presently continued,
with a certain nobleness: "I am the more concerned
because I believe I must hold myself, in a small degree,
responsible for Bessy's marriage—" and, as Justine
looked at her in surprise, she added: "I thought she
could never be happy unless her affections were satisfied—and
even now I believe so."</p>
<p>"I believe so too," Justine said, surprised into assent
by the simplicity of Mrs. Ansell's declaration.</p>
<p>"Well, then—since we are agreed in our diagnosis,"
the older woman went on, smiling, "what remedy do
you suggest? Or rather, how can we administer it?"</p>
<p>"What remedy?" Justine hesitated.</p>
<p>"Oh, I believe we are agreed on that too. Mr.
Amherst must be brought back—but how to bring
him?" She paused, and then added, with a singular
effect of appealing frankness: "I ask you, because I
believe you to be the only one of Bessy's friends who
is in the least in her husband's confidence."</p>
<p>Justine's embarrassment increased. Would it not be
disloyal both to Bessy and Amherst to acknowledge to
a third person a fact of which Bessy herself was unaware?
Yet to betray embarrassment under Mrs. Ansell's
eyes was to risk giving it a dangerous significance.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_359" id="Page_359"></SPAN></span></p>
<p>"Bessy has spoken to me once or twice—but I know
very little of Mr. Amherst's point of view; except,"
Justine added, after another moment's weighing of
alternatives, "that I believe he suffers most from being
cut off from his work at Westmore."</p>
<p>"Yes—so I think; but that is a difficulty that time
and expediency must adjust. All <i>we</i> can do—their
friends, I mean—is to get them together again before
the breach is too wide."</p>
<p>Justine pondered. She was perhaps more ignorant
of the situation than Mrs. Ansell imagined, for since her
talk with Bessy the latter had not again alluded to
Amherst's absence, and Justine could merely conjecture
that he had carried out his plan of taking the
management of the mill he had spoken of. What
she most wished to know was whether he had listened
to her entreaty, and taken the position temporarily,
without binding himself by the acceptance of a salary;
or whether, wounded by the outrage of Bessy's flight,
he had freed himself from financial dependence by
engaging himself definitely as manager.</p>
<p>"I really know very little of the present situation,"
Justine said, looking at Mrs. Ansell. "Bessy merely
told me that Mr. Amherst had taken up his old work
in a cotton mill in the south."</p>
<p>As her eyes met Mrs. Ansell's it flashed across her
that the latter did not believe what she said, and the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_360" id="Page_360"></SPAN></span>
perception made her instantly shrink back into herself.
But there was nothing in Mrs. Ansell's tone to confirm
the doubt which her look betrayed.</p>
<p>"Ah—I hoped you knew more," she said simply;
"for, like you, I have only heard from Bessy that her
husband went away suddenly to help a friend who is
reorganizing some mills in Georgia. Of course, under
the circumstances, such a temporary break is natural
enough—perhaps inevitable—only he must not stay
away too long."</p>
<p>Justine was silent. Mrs. Ansell's momentary self-betrayal
had checked all farther possibility of frank
communion, and the discerning lady had seen her error
too late to remedy it.</p>
<p>But her hearer's heart gave a leap of joy. It was
clear from what Mrs. Ansell said that Amherst had not
bound himself definitely, since he would not have done
so without informing his wife. And with a secret thrill
of happiness Justine recalled his last word to her: "I
will remember all you have said."</p>
<p>He had kept that word and acted on it; in spite of
Bessy's last assault on his pride he had borne with her,
and deferred the day of final rupture; and the sense
that she had had a part in his decision filled Justine
with a glow of hope. The consciousness of Mrs. Ansell's
suspicions faded to insignificance—Mrs. Ansell
and her kind might think what they chose, since all<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_361" id="Page_361"></SPAN></span>
that mattered now was that she herself should act bravely
and circumspectly in her last attempt to save her friends.</p>
<p>"I am not sure," Mrs. Ansell continued, gently
scrutinizing her companion, "that I think it unwise of
him to have gone; but if he stays too long Bessy may
listen to bad advice—advice disastrous to her happiness."
She paused, and turned her eyes meditatively
toward the fire. "As far as I know," she said, with
the same air of serious candour, "you are the only
person who can tell him this."</p>
<p>"I?" exclaimed Justine, with a leap of colour to her
pale cheeks.</p>
<p>Mrs. Ansell's eyes continued to avoid her. "My
dear Miss Brent, Bessy has told me something of the
wise counsels you have given her. Mr. Amherst is
also your friend. As I said just now, you are the only
person who might act as a link between them—surely
you will not renounce the rôle."</p>
<p>Justine controlled herself. "My only rôle, as you
call it, has been to urge Bessy to—to try to allow for
her husband's views——"</p>
<p>"And have you not given the same advice to Mr.
Amherst?"</p>
<p>The eyes of the two women met. "Yes," said Justine,
after a moment.</p>
<p>"Then why refuse your help now? The moment is
crucial."<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_362" id="Page_362"></SPAN></span></p>
<p>Justine's thoughts had flown beyond the stage of resenting
Mrs. Ansell's gentle pertinacity. All her faculties
were absorbed in the question as to how she could
most effectually use whatever influence she possessed.</p>
<p>"I put it to you as one old friend to another—will
you write to Mr. Amherst to come back?" Mrs. Ansell
urged her.</p>
<p>Justine was past considering even the strangeness of
this request, and its oblique reflection on the kind of
power ascribed to her. Through the confused beatings
of her heart she merely struggled for a clearer sense of
guidance.</p>
<p>"No," she said slowly. "I cannot."</p>
<p>"You cannot? With a friend's happiness in extremity?"
Mrs. Ansell paused a moment before she
added. "Unless you believe that Bessy would be happier
divorced?"</p>
<p>"Divorced—? Oh, no," Justine shuddered.</p>
<p>"That is what it will come to."</p>
<p>"No, no! In time——"</p>
<p>"Time is what I am most afraid of, when Blanche
Carbury disposes of it."</p>
<p>Justine breathed a deep sigh.</p>
<p>"You'll write?" Mrs. Ansell murmured, laying a
soft touch on her hand.</p>
<p>"I have not the influence you think——"</p>
<p>"Can you do any harm by trying?"<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_363" id="Page_363"></SPAN></span></p>
<p>"I might—" Justine faltered, losing her exact
sense of the words she used.</p>
<p>"Ah," the other flashed back, "then you <i>have</i> influence!
Why will you not use it?"</p>
<p>Justine waited a moment; then her resolve gathered
itself into words. "If I have any influence, I am not
sure it would be well to use it as you suggest."</p>
<p>"Not to urge Mr. Amherst's return?"</p>
<p>"No—not now."</p>
<p>She caught the same veiled gleam of incredulity under
Mrs. Ansell's lids—caught and disregarded it.</p>
<p>"It must be now or never," Mrs. Ansell insisted.</p>
<p>"I can't think so," Justine held out.</p>
<p>"Nevertheless—will you try?"</p>
<p>"No—no! It might be fatal."</p>
<p>"To whom?"</p>
<p>"To both." She considered. "If he came back
now I know he would not stay."</p>
<p>Mrs. Ansell was upon her abruptly. "You <i>know</i>?
Then you speak with authority?"</p>
<p>"No—what authority? I speak as I feel," Justine
faltered.</p>
<p>The older woman drew herself to her feet. "Ah—then
you shoulder a great responsibility!" She moved
nearer to Justine, and once more laid a fugitive touch
upon her. "You won't write to him?"</p>
<p>"No—no," the girl flung back; and the voices of the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_364" id="Page_364"></SPAN></span>
returning party in the hall made Mrs. Ansell, with an
almost imperceptible gesture of warning, turn musingly
away toward the fire.</p>
<hr style='width: 45%;' />
<p>Bessy came back brimming with the wonders she had
seen. A glazed "sun-room," mosaic pavements, a
marble fountain to feed the marble tank—and outside
a water-garden, descending in successive terraces, to
take up and utilize—one could see how practically!—the
overflow from the tank. If one did the thing at all,
why not do it decently? She had given up her new
motor, had let her town house, had pinched and stinted
herself in a hundred ways—if ever woman was entitled
to a little compensating pleasure, surely she was that
woman!</p>
<p>The days were crowded with consultations. Architect,
contractors, engineers, a landscape gardener, and
a dozen minor craftsmen, came and went, unrolled
plans, moistened pencils, sketched, figured, argued,
persuaded, and filled Bessy with the dread of appearing,
under Blanche Carbury's eyes, subject to any restraining
influences of economy. What! She was a
young woman, with an independent fortune, and she
was always wavering, considering, secretly referring
back to the mute criticism of an invisible judge—of the
husband who had been first to shake himself free of
any mutual subjection? The accomplished Blanche<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_365" id="Page_365"></SPAN></span>
did not have to say this—she conveyed it by the raising
of painted brows, by a smile of mocking interrogation,
a judiciously placed silence or a resigned glance at the
architect. So the estimates poured in, were studied,
resisted—then yielded to and signed; then the hour of
advance payments struck, and an imperious appeal was
despatched to Mr. Tredegar, to whom the management
of Bessy's affairs had been transferred.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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....<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_366" id="Page_366"></SPAN></span></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_367" id="Page_367"></SPAN></span>
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 <i>years</i>!—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!</p>
<p>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....</p>
<p>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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_368" id="Page_368"></SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<p>"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 <i>now</i>!
From the first it was all he cared for—in Europe,
even, he was always dragging me to factories. <i>Me?</i>—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!"</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_369" id="Page_369"></SPAN></span></p>
<p>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....</p>
<p>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 patch-work 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....</p>
<p>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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_370" id="Page_370"></SPAN></span>
decision once reached, hope flowed back to her heart—the
joy of action so often deceived her into immediate
faith in its results!</p>
<p>"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...."</p>
<p>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.</p>
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