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 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....
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.