Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/453

Rh private views, and Mr. Langhope’s open adjurations that he should “do something,” to declare that there was no pretext for questioning the validity of the document.

To Amherst the will was something more than a proof of his wife’s conﬁdence: it came as a reconciling word from her grave. For the date showed that it had been made at a moment when he supposed himself to have lost all inﬂuence over her—on the morrow of the day when she had stipulated that he should give up the management of the Westmore mills, and yield the care of her property to Mr. Tredegar.

“While she smote him with one hand, she sued for pardon with the other; and the contradiction was so characteristic, it explained and excused in so touching a way the inconsistencies of her impulsive heart and hesitating mind, that he was ﬁlled With that tender compunction, that searching sense of his own short-comings, which generous natures feel when they ﬁnd they have underrated the generosity of others. But Amherst’s was not an introspective mind, and his sound moral sense told him, when the ﬁrst pang of self—reproach had subsided, that he had done his best by his wife, and was in no way to blame if her recognition of the fact had come too late. The self-reproach subsided; and, instead of the bitterness of the past, it left a softened memory which made him take up his [ 437 ]