"Sir Basil!" Valeria exclaimed.
She rose from the tea-table, where she and Jack and Mrs. Wake were sitting, to meet the unexpected new-comer.
A gladness that Jack had never seen in her seemed to inundate her face, her figure, her outstretched hands; she looked young, she looked almost childlike, as she smiled at her friend over their clasp, and Jack saw, by the light of that transfiguration, how gray these last months must have been to her, how strangely bereft of response and admiration, how without savor or sweetness. He saw, and with the insight came a sharp stir of bitterness against the new-comer, who threw them all like this into a dull background, and, at the same time, a real echo of her gladness, that she should have it.
He actually, in the sharp, swift twist of feeling, hardly remembered Imogen's forecasts and warnings, hardly remembered that Mrs. Upton's gladness and Sir Basil's beaming gaze put Imogen quite dreadfully in the right. He did not think of Imogen at all, nor of the desecration of the house of mourning by this gladness, so absorbed was he in watching it, in sharing it, and in being hurt by it.
"Mrs. Wake, of course, is an old friend," Valerie said, leading Sir Basil up to the tea-table; "and here is a new one—Jack Pennington, whom you must quite know already, I've written so much about him. Sit down here. Tell me all about everything. Why this sudden appearance? Why no hint of it? Is it meant as a surprise for us?"
"Well, Frances and Tom were coming over, you knew that—"
"Of course. I wrote Frances a steamer letter the day before yesterday. You got in this morning with them then? They said not a word of your coming when I last heard from them."
"I only decided to join them at the last minute. I thought that it would be good fun to drop upon you like this, so I didn't write. Itisgood to see you again." Sir Basil, while his beam seemed to include the room and its inmates, included them unseeingly; he had eyes, it was evident, only for her. He went on to give her messages from the Pakenhams, in New York but for a week on their way to Canada and eager to see her at once. They would have come with him had they not been rather knocked up by the early rise on the steamer and by the long wait at the custom-house.
"You must all come with me to-morrow to our tableaux," said Valerie. "Imogen is in them. She is out this afternoon, so you will see her for the first time at her loveliest. She is to be Antigone."
"Oh, so I sha'n't see her till to-morrow. I've always been a bit afraid ofMiss Upton, you know," said Sir Basil, with a smile at Jack.
"Well, the first impression will be a reassuring one," said Valerie."Antigone is the least alarming of heroines."
"I don't know about that," Sir Basil objected, folding a slice of bread and butter, "A bit gruesome, don't you think?"
"Gruesome?"
"She stuck so to her own ideas, didn't she? Awfully rough on the poor fellow who wanted to marry her, insisting like that on burying her brothers."
Valerie laughed. "Well, but that sense of duty is hardly gruesome; it would have been horridly gruesome to have left her brothers unburied."
"You'll worst me in an argument, of course," Sir Basil replied, looking fondly at her; "but I maintain that she's a dreary young lady. Of course I don't mean to say that she wasn't an exceedingly good girl, and all that sort of thing, but a bit of a prig, you must allow."
Jack listened to the bantering colloquy. This man, so hard, yet so kindly, so innocent, yet so mature, was making him feel by every tone, gesture, glance, oddly boyish and unformed. He was quite sure that he himself was a great deal cleverer, a great deal more conscious, than Sir Basil; but these advantages somehow assumed the aspect of schoolboy badges of good conduct beside a grown-up standard. And, as he listened, he began to understand far more deeply all sorts of things about Valerie; to see what vacancies she had had to put up with, to see what fullness she must have missed. And he began to understand what Imogen, Cassandra-like, had declared, that the unseasonable fragrance of devotions hovered about her widowed mother; to remember the ominous "Wait and see."
It showed how far he had traveled when he could recall these words with impatience: could answer them with: "Well, what of it? Doesn't she deserve some compensation?"—could quietly place Sir Basil as a no longer hopeless adorer and feel a thrill of satisfaction, in the realization. Yes, sitting here here in the house of mourning he could think these things.
But if he was so wide, so tolerant, the very expansion of his sympathies brought them a finer sensitiveness. Only a tendril-like fineness could penetrate the complexities of that deeper vision. He began to think of Imogen, and with a new pity, a new tenderness. How she would be hurt, and how, more than all, she would be hurt by seeing that he, while understanding, while sympathizing, should, helplessly, inevitably, be glad that Sir Basil had come. Poor Imogen,—and poor himself; for where did he stand among all these shiftings of the scene? He, too, knew the drifting loneliness and desolation, and though his heart ached for the old nearness he could not put out his hand to her nor take a step toward her. In himself, in her, was the change, or the mere fate, that held them parted. The wrench had come slowly upon them, but, while he ached with the pain of it, he could already look upon it as accomplished. Only one question remained to be asked:—Would nothing, no change, no fate, draw them again together?
For all answer a deep, settled sadness descended upon him.
Sir Basil took himself off before Mrs. Wake seemed to think it tactful to depart, and since, soon after, she too went, Jack and Valerie were left alone together.
She turned her bright, soft eyes upon the young man and he recognized in them the unseeing quality that he had found in Sir Basil's—that happy preoccupation with inner gladness. She made him think of the bird alighted to sing on the swaying blade; and she made him think of a fountain released from winter and springing through sunlight in a murmur and sparkle of ecstasy. She was young, very young; he almost felt her as young in her gladness as he in his loneliness and pain. Smiling a trifle nervously, he said that he was glad, at last, to see something of her old life. "Of your real life," he added.
"My real life?" she repeated, and her look became more aware of him.
"Yes. Of course, in a sense, all this is something outlived, cast aside, for you. You've only taken it up for a bit while you felt that it had a claim upon you; but, once you have settled things, you would,—you would leave us, of course," said Jack, still smiling.
She was thinking of him now, no longer of herself and of Sir Basil, and perhaps, as she looked at him, at the thin brown face, the light, deep eyes, she guessed at a stir of tears under the smile. It was then as if the fountain sank from its own happy solitude and became a running brook of sweetness, sad, yet merry. She didn't contradict him. She was sorry that she couldn't, yet glad that his statement should be so obviously true.
"You mean that I'll go back to my little Surrey cottage, when I settle things?" she said. "Perhaps, yes. And you will miss me? I will miss you too, dear Jack. But we will often see each other. And then it may take a long time to settle all you young people."
Her confidence so startled him, so touched him with pity for its blindness, that, swiftly, he took refuge in ambiguity.
"Oh, you'll settle us!" he said, wondering in what that settling would consist, wondering what would happen if Imogen, definitely casting him off, to put the final settling in that form, were left on her mother's hands. She would have to settle Imogen in America and what, in the meanwhile, would become of her "real" life?
But from the mother's confidence, her radiance, that accepted his speech in its happiest meaning, he guessed that she didn't foresee such a contingency; he even guessed that, were she brought face to face with it, she wouldn't accept its unsettling of her own joy as final. The fountain was too strong to heed such obstacles. It would find its way to the sunlight. Imogen, in time, would have to accept a step-father.
Jack did not witness the revelation to Imogen of the ominous arrival, but from her demeanor at lunch next day he could guess at how it had impressed her. He felt in her an intense, a guarded, excitement, and knew that the news had fallen upon her with a tingling concussion. The sound of the thunder-bolt must reverberate all the louder in Imogen's ears from her consciousness that to Mary's it was soundless, Mary, who had been the only spectator of its falling. Her mother, too, was unconscious of such reverberations, so that it must seem to her a ghost-like subjective warning, putting into audible form all her old hauntings.
That she at once sought in him evidences of the same experience, Jack felt, and all through the early lunch, where they assembled prior to his departure with the two girls for the theater, he avoided meeting Imogen's eyes. He was too sure that she felt their mutual knowledge as a bond over the recent chasm. The knowledge in his own eyes was far too deep for him to allow her to wade into it; she would simply drown. He was rather ashamed of himself, but he resolutely feigned a cheerful unconsciousness.
"You are going with your friends, later?" he asked Valerie, who, he was quite sure, also feigning something, said that since Imogen and Mary dressed each other so well, and since he would be there to see that every detail was right, she, with the Pakenhams and Sir Basil, would get her impression from the stalls. Afterward, they would all meet here for tea.
"It was a surprise, you know, their coming," Imogen put in suddenly, from her end of the table, fixing strangely sparkling eyes upon Jack.
"No," said her mother, in tones of leisurely correction, "I expected thePakenhams, as I told you."
"Oh, yes; it was only Sir Basil's surprise. You didn't expect him. Does he like playing surprises on people, mama?"
"I don't know that he does."
"He only plays them on you."
"I knew that he was coming, at some time."
"Ah, but you didn't tell me that; it was, in the main,mysurprise, then; but not so soon, I suppose."
"So soon? So soon for what?"
Imogen, at this, allowed her badly adjusted mask of lightness to fall and a sudden solemnity overspread her features.
"Don't you feel it rather soon for friends to play pranks, mama?"
The words seemed to erect a catafalque before their eyes, but, facing the nodding blackness with a calm in which Jack detected the glint of steel, Valerie answered: "I am not aware that they have been playing pranks."
For all the way to the theater Imogen again assumed the mask, talking exclusively to Mary. She talked of these friends of her mother's, of Sir Basil, Mr. and Mrs. Pakenham, what she had heard of them; holding up, as if for poor, frightened Mary's delectation, an impartial gaily sketched little portrait of their oddities. It was as if she felt it her duty to atone to Mary by her lightness and gaiety for the gloom that had overspread the lunch; as if she wished to assure Mary that she wouldn't allow her to suffer for other people's ill-temper,—Mrs. Upton had certainly been very silent for the rest of that uncomfortable meal,—as if it were for Mary's sake that she were assuming the mask, behind which, as Jack must know, she was in torture.
"I'm glad you're to see them, Mary darling; they will amuse you. From your standpoint of reality, the standpoint of Puritan civilization—the deepest civilization the world has yet produced; the civilization that judges by the soul—you will be able to judge and place them as few of our people are, as yet, developed enough to do. They are of that funny English type, Mary, the leisured; their business in life that of pleasure seeking; their social service consisting in benevolent domination over the servile classes beneath them. Oh, they have their political business, too; we mustn't be unfair; though that consists, in the main, for people of their type, in maintaining their own place as donors and in keeping other people in the place of recipients. In their own eyes, I'm quite sure, they are useful, as upholding the structure of English civilization. You'll find them absolutely simple, absolutely self-assured, absolutely indifferent, quite charming,—there's no reason why they shouldn't be; but their good manners are for themselves, not for you,—one must never forget that with the English. Do study them, Mary. We need to keep the fact of them clearly before us, for what they represent is a menace to us and to what we mean. I sometimes think that the future of the world depends upon which ideal is to win, ours or the English. We must arm ourselves with complete comprehension. Already they have infected the cruder types among us."
These were all sentiments that in the past, Mary felt sure, Jack must have acquiesced in and approved of, and yet she felt surer that Imogen's manner of enunciating them was making Jack very angry. She herself did not find them as inspiring as she might have expected, and looking very much frightened and flurried she murmured that as she was to go back to Boston next day she would not have much opportunity for all this observation. "Besides—I don't believe that I'm so—so wise—so civilized, you know, as to be able to see it all."
"Oh, Imogen will tell you what to see!" said Jack.
"It's very kind of her, I'm sure," poor Mary faltered. She could have burst into tears. These two!—these beloved two!
Meanwhile, at a little later hour, Valerie and Mrs. Wake made their way to the theater, there to meet the group of friends from whom they had parted in England six months before.
The Pakenhams, full of question and comment, were intelligently amassing well-assorted impressions of the country that was new to them. Sir Basil, though cheerfully pleased with all to which his attention was drawn, showed no particular interest in his surroundings. His concentration was entirely for his regained friend.
After her welcoming radiance of the day before, Valerie looked pale and weary, and when, with solicitude, he asked her whether she were not tired, she confessed to having slept badly.
"She's changed, you know," Sir Basil said to Mrs. Pakenham, when they were settled in their seats, and Valerie, beside him, was engaged in pointing out people to Tom Pakenham. "It's been frightfully hard on her, all this, I'm sure."
"She's as charming as ever," said Mrs. Pakenham.
"Oh, well, that could never change. But what a shame that she should have had, all along, such a lot to go through." Sir Basil, as a matter of course, had the deepest antipathy for the late Mr. Upton.
The tableaux struck at once the note of success. Saved by Jack's skill from any hint of waxwork or pantomime, their subtle color and tranquil light made each picture a vision of past time, an evocation of Hellenic beauty and dignity.
Cassandra in her car—her face (oh, artful Jack!) turned away,—awful before the door of Agamemnon; Iphigenia, sleeping, on her way to the sacrifice; Helen, before her husband and Hecuba; Alcestis, returning from the grave, and Deianira with the robe. The old world of beauty and sorrow, austere and lovely in its doom, passed before modern eyes against its background of sky, grove, and palace steps.
"And now," said Valerie, when the lights sprang out for the interval, "now for your introduction to Imogen. They have made her the climax, you see."
"He did, you mean. The young man."
"Yes, Jack arranged it all."
"He's the one you wrote of, of course, who admires her so tremendously."
"He is the one."
"In fact he'll carry her off from you some day, soon, eh?" Sir Basil ventured with satisfaction in his own assurance. He, too, felt that Imogen must be "settled."
"I suppose so," said Valerie. "I couldn't trust her to any one more happily. He understands her and cares for her absolutely."
Sir Basil at this ventured a little further, voicing both satisfaction and anxiety with: "So, then, you'll come back—to—to Surrey."
"Yes, then, I think, I can come back to Surrey," Valerie replied.
The heart of her feeling had always remained for him a mystery, and her acquiescence now might mean a great deal, everything, in fact, or it might mean only her gliding composure before a situation that she had power to form as she would. He could observe that her color rose. He knew that she blushed easily. He knew, too, that his own feeling was not hidden from her and that the blush might be for her recognition only; yet he was occupied with the most hopeful interpretations when the curtain rose. A moment after its rising Valerie heard him softly ejaculate, "I say!" She could have echoed the helplessly rudimentary, phrase. She, too, gazed, in a stupor of delight; a primitive emotion in it. The white creature standing there before them, with her forward poise, her downcast yet upgazing face, was her child. Valerie, since her return to her home, had given little time to analysis of her own feeling, the stress of her situation had been too intense for leisurely self-observation. But in the upwelling of a strange, a selfless, joy she knew, now, how often she had feared that all the joy of maternity was dead in her; killed, killed by Imogen.
The joy now was a passing ray. The happy confusion of admiration, wonder, and pride was blotted out by the falling gloom of reality. It was her child who stood there, but the bond between them seemed, but for the ache of rejected maternity at her heart, a pictorial one merely. Tears of bitterness involuntarily filled her eyes as she looked, and Imogen's form seemed to waver in a dim, an alien atmosphere.
When the curtain fell on the Antigone who kept her pose without a tremor, the uproar of applause was so great that it had to rise, not only twice, but three times. At the last, a faint wavering shook slightly the Antigone's sculptured stillness and poor old Oedipus rocked obviously upon his feet.
"What a shame to make her keep it up for so long!" murmured Sir Basil, his face suffused with sympathy. The symptom of human weakness was a final touch to the enchantment.
"Well, it makes one selfish, such loveliness!" said Mrs. Pakenham, flushed with her clapping. "Valerie, dear, she is quite too lovely!"
"Extraordinarily Greek, the whole thing," said Tom Pakenham; "the comparative insignificance of facial expression and the immense significance of attitude and outline."
"But the face!" Sir Basil turned an unseeing eye upon him, still wrapped, it was evident, in the vision that, at last, had disappeared. "The figure is perfect; but the face,—I never saw anything so heavenly."
Indeed, in its slightly downcast pose, the trivial lines of Imogen's nose and chin had been lost; the up-gazing eyes, the sweep of brow and hair, had dominated and transfigured her somewhat tamely perfect countenance.
"Do you know, I'm more afraid of her than ever," said Sir Basil to Valerie on their way home to tea, in the cab. "I wasn't really afraid before. I could have borne up very well; but now—it's like knowing that one is to have tea with a seraph."
Jack, Imogen, and Mary were not yet arrived when they reached the house; but by the time the tea was on the table and Valerie in her place behind the urn, they heard the cab drive up and the feet of the young people on the stairs.
Jack entered alone, saying that Mary and Imogen were gone to take off their wraps. Yes, he assured Valerie, they had promised to keep on their Grecian robes for tea.
Valerie introduced him to the Pakenhams and led the congratulations on his triumph. "For it really is yours, Jack, as much as if you had painted the whole series of pictures."
Jack, looking shy, turned from one to the other as they seconded her enthusiasm,—Mrs. Pakenham, with her elaborately formal head and china-blue eyes; her husband, robust and heavy; Sir Basil, still with his benignant, unseeing quality. Among them all, in spite of Mrs. Wake's keen, familiar visage, in spite of Valerie's soft glow, he felt himself a stranger. He even felt, with a little stab of ill-temper, that there had been truth in Imogen's diagnosis. They were kindly, but they were tremendously indifferent. They didn't at all expect you to be interested in them; but that hardly atoned for the fact that they weren't interested in you. For Jack, life was made up of vigilant, unceasing interest, in himself and in everybody else.
"Ah, were they all taken from your pictures?" Sir Basil asked him, strolling up to the mantelpiece to examine a photograph of Imogen that stood there.
Jack explained that he could claim no such gallery of achievement. He had made a few sketches for each tableau; his work had been, in the main, that of stage-manager.
"Oh, I see," said Sir Basil, not at all abashed by his blunder. "Nicer than lay figures to work with, eh? all those pretty young women."
"I don't use lay figures, at any time. I'm a landscape painter," Jack explained, somewhat stiffly. He surmised that had he been introduced as Velasquez Sir Basil would have been quite as unmoved, just as he would have been quite as genially inclined had he been introduced as a scene-painter.
"I used to think I'd go in for something of that sort in my young days," said Sir Basil, holding Imogen's photograph; "and I dabbled a bit in water-color for a time. Do you remember that little sketch of the Hall, done from the beech avenue, Mrs. Upton? Not so bad, was it?"
"Not at all bad," said Valerie; "but we can't use such negatives for Jack's work. It's very seriously good, you know. It's anything but dabbling."
"Oh, yes; I know that you are a real artist," Sir Basil smiled at Jack from the photograph. "This doesn't do her justice, does it?"
"Imogen? No; it's a frightful thing," said Jack over-emphatically.
Mrs. Pakenham asked to see it and pronounced that, for her part, she thought it excellent.
"You ought to paint her portrait," Sir Basil continued, looking at Jack, who had, once more, to explain that landscape was his only subject. He guessed from the something at once benign and faintly quizzical in Sir Basil's regard, that to all these people he was significant, in the main, as Imogen's lover, and the intuition vexed him still further.
Imogen's entrance, startling in its splendid incongruity, put an end to his self-consciousness and absorbed him in contemplation.
Imogen revealed herself newly, even to him, to-day. It wasn't the old Imogen of stateliness, graciousness, placidity, nor the later one of gloom and anger. This Imogen, lovely, with her flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes, was deeply excited, deeply self-forgetful. She, too, was absorbed in her intense curiosity, her feverish watchfulness.
She said nothing while her mother introduced her to the new-comers, who all looked a little taken aback, as though the resuscitated Grecian heroine were indeed among them, and stood silently alert near the tea-table, handing the cups of tea, the cakes and scones, for Jack and Sir Basil to pass round. Her arms were bare and her slender bare feet, laced with gold-clasped fastenings, showed on her white sandals. Jack saw that Sir Basil's eyes were fixed on her with an expression of wonder.
He asked her, as he took the last cup from her, if she were not cold, and, gentle, though unsmiling, Imogen replied, "Oh, no!" glancing at the roaring wood fire, that illuminated her whiteness as if with a sacrificial glow.
"Do sit down and have your tea, Imogen; you must be very tired," her mother said, with something of the chill that the scene at the lunch-table had diffused still in her voice.
"Not very, thanks, mama dear," said Imogen; and, more incongruous in loveliness than before, she sat down in a high-backed chair at some little distance from the tea-table. Sir Basil, as if with a sort of helplessness, remained beside her.
"Yes, it was a great success, wasn't it?" Jack heard her replying presently, while she drank the tea with which Sir Basil had eagerly supplied her. "I'm so glad."
"You liked doing it, didn't you? You couldn't have done it, like that—looked like that, if you hadn't cared a lot about it," Sir Basil pursued.
Imogen smiled a little and said that she didn't know that she had liked doing her part particularly,—it was of her crippled children that she was thinking. "We'll be able to get the Home now," she said.
"It was for cripple children?"
"Didn't you know? I should have thought mama would have told you. Yes, it all meant that, only that, to me. We gave the tableaux to get enough money to buy a country home for them."
"You go in a lot for good works, I know," said Sir Basil, and Imogen, smiling again, with the lightness rooted in excitement, answered: "They go in for me, rather. All the appeals of suffering seem to come to one and seize one, don't they? One never needs to seek causes."
Jack watched them talk, Imogen, the daughter of the dead, rejected husband, and Sir Basil, her mother's suitor.
Mary had come in now, late from changing her dress, which at the last moment she had felt too shy to appear in. She was talking to Mrs. Wake and the Pakenhams.
Standing, a somewhat brooding onlooker, becoming conscious, indeed, of the sense, stronger than ever, of loneliness and bereavement, he heard Mrs. Upton near him say, "Sit down here, Jack."
She showed him a chair beside her, in the corner, between her tea-table, the window, and the fire. She, too, was for the moment isolated; she, too, no doubt, had been watching; and now she talked to him, not at all as if she had felt that he were lonely and were making it up to him, but, once more, like the child happily gathering and holding out nosegays to another child.
A controlled excitement was in her, too; and he felt still that slight strain of the lunch-table, as if Imogen's catafalque had marred some too-trustful assurance; but a growing warmth was diffused through it, and, as her eyes turned once or twice on Imogen and Sir Basil, he saw the cause.
The possibility that her daughter might make friends with her suitor, the solvent, soothing possibility that, if realized, would so smooth her path, had come to her. And in their quiet fire-lit corner, shut the closer into their isolation by the talk that made only a confused murmur about them, he felt a new frankness in her, as though the hope of the hour effaced ominous memories and melted her reserves and discretions, making it wholly natural to draw near him in the implied avowal of shared outlooks.
"I believe that Imogen and Sir Basil are going to get on together," she said; "I believe that she likes him already. I so want them to be friends. He is such a friend of mine."
"They look friendly," said Jack; "I think I can always tell when Imogen is going to like people." He did not add that, with his new insight about Imogen, he had observed that it was people over whom she had power that Imogen liked. And already he seemed to see that Imogen would have some sort of power over Sir Basil.
"And I can always tell when he is going to like people. He thinks her wonderful," said Valerie. She exchanged her knowledge with him; it was touching, the way in which, blind to deep change in him, she took for granted his greater claim to the interpretation of Imogen. She added: "It is a very propitious beginning, I think."
"How long is Sir Basil going to stay here?" Jack asked.
"All summer. He goes to Canada with the Pakenhams, and out to the West, for a glimpse of the changes since he was here years and years ago; and then I want him to come to Vermont, to us. You and Imogen will both get to know him well there. Of course you are coming; Imogen told me that she asked you long ago."
"Yes; I shall enjoy that immensely," the young man answered, with, for his own consciousness, a touch of irrepressible gloom. He didn't look forward to the continuation of the drama, to his own lame and merely negative part in it, at the close quarters of a house-party among the Vermont hills.
And as if Valerie bad felt the inner doubt she added suddenly, on a different key, "You really will enjoy it, won't you?"
He looked up at her. Her face, illuminated by the firelight, though dimmed against the evening blue outside, was turned on him with its sudden intentness and penetration of gaze.
"Why, of course," he almost stammered, confused by the unexpected scrutiny.
"I shall love having you, you know," she said.
"I shall love being with you," he answered, now without a single inner reserve.
Her intentness seemed to soften, there was solicitude and a sort of persuasiveness in it. "And you will have a much better chance of really adjusting things there—your friendship with Imogen, I mean. The country smoothes things out. Things get sweet and simple."
He didn't know what to say. Her mistake, if it were one, was so inevitable.
"Imogen will have taken her bearings by then," she went on. "She has had so much to get accustomed to, to bear with, poor child; her great bereavement, and—and a mother who, in some ways, must always be a trial to her."
"Oh, a trial!"—Jack lamely murmured.
"I recognize it, Jack. I think that you do. But when she makes up her mind to me, and discovers that, at all events, I don't interfere with anything that she really cares about, she will be able to take up all her old threads again."
"I—I suppose so," Jack murmured.
He had dropped his eyes, for he knew that hers were on him. And now, in a lowered voice, he heard her say, "Jack, I hope that you will help me with Imogen."
"Help you? How do you mean?" startled, he looked up.
"You know. Interpret me to her now and then, when you can, with kindliness.You understand me so much more kindly than she does."
His eyes fixed on hers, deeply flushing—"Oh, but,"—he breathed out with almost a long sigh,—"that's what I have done, you see, ever since—"
"Ever since what?"
"Since I came to understand you so much better than she does."
There was a long pause now and, the firelight flickering low, he could hardly see her face. But he recognized change in her voice as she said: "You have? I don't mean, you know, taking my side in disputes."
"I know; I don't mean that, either, though, perhaps, I can't help doing it; for," said Jack, "it's on your side that I am, you know."
The change in her voice, but controlled, kept down, she answered quickly,
"Ah, but, dear Jack, I don't want to have a side. It's that that I want her to realize. I want her to feel that my side is hers. I want you to help me in making her feel it."
"But she'll never feel it!" Jack breathed out again. Behind the barrier of the tea-table, in the flickering dimness, they were speaking suddenly with a murmuring, yet so sharp a confidence; a confidence that in broad daylight, or in complete solitude, might have seemed impossible. All sorts of things must steal out in that persuasive, that peopled yet solitary, twilight.
He knew that Valerie's eyes dwelt on him with anxiety and that it was with a faint, forced smile that she asked him: "She doesn't think that I'll ever reach her side?"
"Idon't believe you ever will," said Jack. Then, for he couldn't bear that she should misunderstand him for another moment, misunderstanding when they had come so far was too unendurable, he went on in a hurried undertone: "You aren't on her side, really. You can never be on her side. You can never be like her, or see like her. And I don't want you to. It's you who see clearly, not she. It's you who are all right."
Her long silence, after this, seemed to him like the hovering of hands upon him; as though, in darkness, she sought by touch to recognize some strange object put before her.
"But then,—" she, too, only breathed it out at last,—"but then,—you are not onherside."
"That's just it," said Jack. He did not look at her and she was silent once more before his confession.
"But," she again took up the search, "that is terrible for her, if she feels it."
"And for me, too, isn't it?" he questioned, as if he turned the surfaces of the object beneath her fingers.
The soft, frightened hover seemed to go all over it, to recognize it finally, and to draw back, terrified, from recognition.
"Most terrible of all for me, if I have come between you," she said.
Her pain pierced him so, that he put out his hand and took hers. Don't think that; you mustn't think that, not for a moment. It's not that you came between us. It's only that, because of you, I began to see things—as I hadn't seen them. It was just,—well, just like seeing one color change when another is put beside it. Imogen's blue, now that your gold has come, is turned to green; that's all that has happened."
"All that has happened! Do you know what you are saying, Jack! If my gold were gone, would the blue come back again?"
"The blue will never come back," said Jack.
He felt, as her hand tightened on his, that he would have liked to put his head down on her knees and sob like a little boy; but when she said, "And the green you cannot care for?" his own hand tightened as if they clutched some secret together, some secret that neither must dare look at. "You mustn't think that—you mustn't. And I mustn't." He said it with all the revolt and all the strength of his will and loyalty; with all his longing, too. "The real truth is that the green can't care for me unless I will see it back to blue again—and as I can't do that, and as it won't accept my present vision, there is a sort of dead-lock."
For a long moment her hand continued to grasp his, before, as if taking in the ambiguous comfort of his final definiteness, it relaxed and she drew it away.
"Perhaps she will care enough," she said.
"To accept my vision? To forego blue? To consent that I shall see her as green?"
"Yes, when she has taken up all the threads."
"Perhaps she will," said Jack.
It was a few days after this, just before Jack's return to Boston—and the parting now was to be until they met in Vermont—that he and Imogen had another walk, another talk together.
The mid-May had become seasonably mild and, at Jack's suggestion, they had taken the elevated cars up to Central Park for the purpose of there seeing the wistaria in its full bloom.
They strolled in the sunlight under arbors rippling all over with the exquisite purple, dark and pale, the thin fine leaves of a strange olive-green, the delicate tendrils; they passed into open spaces where, on gray rocks, it streamed like the tresses of a cascade; it climbed and heaped itself on wayside trellises and ran nimbly, in a shower of fragile color, up the trunks, along the branches, of the trees. Jack always afterward associated the soft, falling purple, the soft, languorous fragrance, the almost uncanny beauty of the wistaria, with melancholy and presage.
Imogen, for the first time since her father's death, showed a concession to the year's revival in a transparent band of white at her neck and wrists. Her little hat, too, was of transparent black, its crape put aside. But, though she and the day shared in bloom and youthfulness, Jack had never seen her look more heavily bodeful; had never seen her eyes more fixed, her lips more cold and stern. The excitement that he had felt in her was gone. Her curiosity, her watchfulness, had been satisfied, and grimly rewarded. She faced sinister facts. Jack felt himself ready to face them, too.
They had spoken little in the clattering car, and for a long time after they reached the park and walked hither and thither among its paths, following at random the beckoning purple of the wistaria, neither spoke of anything but commonplaces; indicating points of view, or assenting to appreciations. But Imogen said at last, and he knew that with the words she led him up to those facts: "Do you remember, Jack, the day we met mama, you and I, on the docks?"
Jack replied that he did.
"What a different day from this," said Imogen, "with its frosty glory, its challenge, its strength."
"Very different."
"And how different our lives are," said Imogen.
He did not reply for some moments, and it was then to say gently that he hoped they were not so different as, perhaps, they seemed.
"It is not I who have changed, Jack," said Imogen, looking before her. And going on, as though she wished to hear no reply to this: "Do you remember how we felt as the steamer came in? We determined thatsheshould change nothing, that we wouldn't yield to any menace of the things we were then united in holding dear. It's strange, isn't it, to see how subtly she has changed everything? It's as if our frosty, sparkling landscape, all wind and vigor and discipline, were suddenly transformed to this,—" Imogen looked about her at the limpid day,—"to soft yielding, soft color, soft perfume,—it's like mama, that fragrance of the wistaria,—to something smiling, languid, alluring. This is the sort of day on which one drifts. Our past day was a day of steering."
As much as for the meaning of her careful words, Jack felt rising in him an anger against the sense of a readiness prepared beforehand. "You describe it all very prettily, Imogen," he answered, mastering the anger. "But I don't agree with you."
"You seldom do now, Jack. Perhaps it's because I've remained in my own climate while you have been borne by the 'warm, sweet, harmless' current into this one."
"I am not conscious of any tendency to drift, Imogen. I still steer. I intend, very firmly, always to steer."
"To what, may I ask?"
He was silent for a moment; then said, lifting eyes in which she read all that new steeliness of opposition, with, yet, in it, through it, the sadness of hopeless appeal: "I believe in all our ideals—just as I used to."
To this Imogen made no rejoinder.
"Do you like Sir Basil?" she asked presently, after, for some time, they had turned along the windings of a long path in a heavy silence.
"I've hardly seen him." Jack's voice had a forced lightness, as though for relief at the change of subject; but he guessed that the change was only apparent. "He is very nice; very delightful looking."
"Yes; very delightful looking. Do you happen to remember what I said to you about him, long ago, in the winter? About him and mama?"
"Yes"; Jack flushed; "I remember."
"I told you to wait."
"Yes; you told me to wait."
"You will own now, I hope, that I was right."
"Right in thinking that he—that they were more than friends?"
"Right in thinking that he was in love with her; that she allowed it."
"I suppose you were right."
"I was right. And it's more than that now. I have every reason to believe that she intends to marry him."
He ignored her portentous pause and drop of the voice, walking on with downcast eyes. "You mean, it's an accepted thing?"
"Oh, no! not yet accepted. Mama respects the black edge, you know. But I heard Mrs. Wake and Mrs. Pakenham talking about it."
"Heard? How could you have heard?" Jack's eyes, stern with accusation, were now upon her.
It was impossible for Imogen to lie consciously, and though she had not, in her eagerness that he should own her right and share her reprobation, foreseen this confrontation, she held, before it, all the dignity of full sincerity.
"You are changed, indeed, Jack, when you can suspect me of eavesdropping! I was asleep on the sofa in the library, worn out with work, and I woke to hear them talking in the next room, with the door ajar. I did not realize, for some moments, what was being said. And then they went out."
"Of course I don't suspect you; of course I don't think that you would eavesdrop; though I do hate—hearing," Jack muttered.
"I hope you realize that I share your hatred," said Imogen. "But your opinion of me is not, here, to the point. I only wish to put before you what I have now to bear, Mrs. Pakenham said that she wagered that before the year was out Sir Basil would have married mama." Imogen paused, breathing deeply.
Jack walked on beside her, not knowing what to say. "I think so, too, and wish her joy," would have been the truest rendering of his feeling.
He curbed it to ask cautiously, "And you mind so much?"
"Mind!" she repeated, a thunderous echo.
"You dislike it so?"
"Dislike? You use strangely inapt words."
He had another parenthetic shoot of impatience with her dreadful articulateness; had Imogen always talked so much like the heroine of a novel with a purpose?
"I only meant—can't you put up with it?"
"Put up with it? Can I do anything else? What power have I over her? You don't seem to understand. I have passed beyond caring that she makes herself petty, ridiculous; as a woman of her age must in marrying again—the clutch of fading life at the happiness it has forfeited. Let her clutch if she chooses; let her marry if she chooses, whom she chooses, yes, when she chooses. But don't you see how it shatters my every hope of her,—my every ideal of her? And don't you see how my heart is pierced by the presence of that man in my father's house, the house that she abandoned and cast a shadow upon? How filled with bitter shame and anguish I am when I see him there, in that house, sacred to my grief and to my memories—making love to my mother?"
No, really, never, never had he heard Imogen so fluent and so dramatically telling; and never had he been so unmoved by the feeling under the fluency. It was as if he could believe in none.
He remained silent and Imogen continued: "When she came back, I believed that it was with an impulse of penitence; with the wish, shallow though I knew that it must be in such a nature, to atone to me for the ruin that she had made in his life. I was all tenderness and sympathy for her, all a longing to help and sustain her—as you must remember. But now! It fulfils all that I had feared and suspected in her—and more than all! She left England, she came here, that the conventions might be observed; and, considering them observed enough for her purpose, she receives her suitor, eight months after my father's lonely death,-in the house wheremyheart breaks and bleeds for him, whereImourn for him, whereI—alone, it seems—feel him flouted and betrayed! And she talks of her love for me!"
Jack was wondering that her coherent passion did not beat him into helpless acquiescence; but, instead, he found himself at once replying, "You don't see fairly. You exaggerate it all. She was unhappy with your father. For years he made her unhappy. And now, if she can care for a man who can make her happy, she has a right, a perfect right, to take her happiness. As for her loving you, I don't believe that any one loves you more truly. It's your chance, now, to show your love for her."
Imogen stood still and looked at him from the black disk of her parasol.
"I think I've suspected this of you, too, Jack," she said. "Yes, I've suspected, in dreadful moments of revelation, how far your undermining has gone. And you say you are not changed!"
"Would you ask your mother never to marry again?"
"I would—if she were in any way to redeem her image in my eyes. But, granting to the full that one must make concessions to such creatures of the senses, I would ask her, at the very least, to have waited."
"Creatures of the senses!" Jack repeated in a helpless gasp; such words, in their austere vocabulary, were hardly credible. "Do you know what you are saying, you arrogant, you heartless girl?"
Her face seemed to flash at him like lightning from a black cloud, and with the lightning a reality that had lacked before to leap to her voice:
"Ah! At last—at last you are saying what you have felt for a long time! At last I know what you think of me! So be it! I don't retract one jot or tittle of what I say. Mama is a perfectly moral woman, if you actually imagine some base imputation; but she lives for the pleasant, the pretty, the easy. She doesn't love this man's soul—nor care if he has one. Her love for him is a parody of the love that my father taught me to understand and to hold sacred. She loves his love for her; his 'delightful' appearance. She loves his place and name and all the power and leisure of the life he can give her. She loves the world—in him; and in that I mean and repeat that she is a creature of the senses. And if, for this, you think me arrogant and heartless, you do not trouble in one whit my vision of myself, but you do, forever, mar my vision of you."
They stood face to face in the soft sweet air under an arch of wistaria; it seemed a place to plight a troth, not to break one; but Jack knew that, if he would, he could not have kept the truth from her. It held him, looked from him; he was, at last, inevitably, to speak it.
"Imogen," he said, "I don't want to talk to you about your mother; I don't want to defend her to you; I'm past that. I'll say nothing of your summing up of her character,—it's grotesque, it's piteous, such assurance! But I do tell you straight what I've come to feel of you—that you are a cold-blooded, self-righteous, self-centered girl. And I'll say more: I think that your bringing-up, the artificiality, the complacent theory of it, is your best excuse; and I think that you'll never find any one so generous and so understanding of you as your mother. If this mars me in your eyes, I can't help it."
For a moment, in her deep anger,—horror running through it, too, as though the very bottom had dropped out of things and she saw emptiness beneath her,—she thought that she would tell him to leave her there, forever. But Imogen's intelligence was at times a fairly efficacious substitute for deeper promptings; and humiliation, instead of enwrapping her mind in a flare of passionate vanity, seemed, when such intellectual apprehension accompanied it, to clarify, to steady her thoughts. She saw, now, in the sudden uncanny illumination, that in all her vehemence of this afternoon there had been something fictitious. The sorrow, the resentment on her father's account, she had, indeed, long felt; too long to feel keenly. Her disapproval of the second marriage was already tinctured by a certain satisfaction; it would free her of a thorn in the flesh, for such her mother's presence in her life had become, and it would justify forever her sense of superiority. It was all the clearest cause for indignation that her mother had given her, and, seeing it as such, she had longed to make Jack share her secure reprobation; but she hadn't, really, been able to feel it as she saw it. It solved too many problems and salved too many hurts. So now, standing there under the arch of wistaria, she saw through herself; saw, at the very basis of her impulse, the dislocation that had made its demonstration dramatic and unconvincing. Dreadful as the humiliation was, her lips growing parched, her throat hot and dry with it, her intelligence saw its cause too clearly for her to resent it as she would have resented one less justified. There was, perhaps, something to be said for Jack, disastrously wrong though he was; and, with all her essential Tightness, there was, perhaps, something to be said against her. She could not break, without further reflection, the threads that still held them together.
So, at the moment of their deepest hostility, Jack was to have his sweetest impression of her. She didn't order him away in tragic tones, as he almost expected; she didn't overwhelm him with an icy torrent of reproach and argument. Instead, as she stood there against her halo of black, the long regard of her white face fixed on him, her eyes suddenly filled with tears. She didn't acquiesce for a moment, or, for a moment, imply him anything but miserably, pitiably wrong; but in a voice from which every trace of anger had faded she said: "Oh Jack, how you hurt me!"
The shock of his surprise was so great that his cheeks flamed as though she had struck him. Answering tears sprang to his eyes. He stammered, could not speak at first, then got out: "Forgive me. I'd no business to say it. It's lovely of you, Imogen, not just to send me off."
She felt her triumph, her half-triumph, at once. "Why, Jack, if you think it, why should I forgive you for saying what, to you, seems the truth? You have forgotten me, Jack, almost altogether; but don't forget that truth is the thing that I care most for. If you must think these things of me—and not only of me, of a dearer self, for I understand all that you meant—I must accept the sorrow and pain of it. When we care for people we must accept suffering because of them. Perhaps, in time, you may come to see differently."
He knew, though she made him feel so abashed, that he could take back none of the "things" he thought; but as she had smiled faintly at him he answered with a wavering smile, putting out his hand to hers and holding it while he said: "Shall we agree, then, to say nothing more about it! To be as good friends—as the truth will let us?"
He had never hurt her as at that moment of gentleness, compunction, and inflexibility, and thought, for a moment, was obscured by a rush of bitter pain that could almost have cast her upon his breast, weeping and suppliant for all that his words shut the door on—perhaps forever.
But such impulses were swiftly mastered in poor Imogen. Gravely pressing his hand, she accepted the cutting compact, and, over her breathless sense of loss, held firm to the spiritual advantage of magnanimity and courage. He judged himself, not her, in letting her go, if he was really letting her go; and she must see him wander away into the darkness, alone, leaving her alone. It was tragic; it was nearly unendurable; but this was one of life's hard lessons; her father had so often told her that they must be unflinchingly faced, unflinchingly conquered. So she triumphed over the weak crying out of human need.
They walked on slowly again, both feeling a little "done." Neither spoke until, at the entrance of the park, and just before leaving its poetry for the screaming prose of the great city, Imogen said: "One thing I want to tell you, Jack, and that is that you may trust mama to me. Whatever I may think of this happiness that she is reaching out for, I shall not make it difficult or painful for her to take it. My pain shall cast no shadow on her gladness."
Jack's face still showed its flush and his voice had all the steadiness of his own interpretation, the steadiness of his refusal to accept hers, as he answered, "Thanks, Imogen; that's very right of you."
Imogen and Sir Basil were walking down a woodland path under the sky of American summer, a vast, high, cloudless dome of blue. Trees, tall and delicate, in early June foliage, grew closely on the hillside; the grass of the open glades was thick with wild Solomon's-seal, and fragile clusters of wild columbine grew in the niches and crannies of the rocks, their pale-red chalices filled with fantastically fretted gold.
Imogen, dressed in thin black lawn, fine plaitings of white at throat and wrists, her golden head uncovered, walked a little before Sir Basil with her long, light, deliberate step. She had an errand in the village two miles away, and her mother had suggested that Sir Basil should go with her and have some first impressions of rural New England. He had only arrived the night before. Miss Bocock and the Pottses were expected this afternoon, and Mrs. Wake had been for a fortnight established in her tiny cottage on the opposite hillside.
"Tell me about your village here," Sir Basil had said, and Imogen, with punctual courtesy and kindness, the carrying out of her promise to Jack, had rejoined: "It would be rather uneventful annals that I should have to tell you. The people are palely prosperous. They lead monotonous lives. They look forward for variety and interest, I think, to the summer, when all of us are here. One does all one can, then, to make some color for them. I have organized a kindergarten for the tiny children, and a girls' club for debates and reading; it will help to an awakening I believe. I'm going to the club this afternoon. I'm very grateful to my girls for helping me as they do to be of use to them. It's quite wonderful what they have done already. Our village life is in no sense like yours in England, you know; these people are all very proud and independent. It's as a friend, not as a Lady Bountiful, that I go among them."
"I see," said Sir Basil, with interest, "that's awfully nice all round. I wish we could get rid of a lot of stupid ways of thought at home. I'll see something of these friends of yours at the house, then. I'm immensely interested in all these differences, you know."
"You won't see them at the house. Our relation is friendly, not social.That is a froth that doesn't count."
"Oh! and they don't mind that—not having the social relation, I mean—if they are friends?"
"Why should they? I am not hurt because they do not ask me to their picnics and parties, nor are they because I don't ask them to my dinners and teas. We both understand that all that is a matter of manner and accident; that in essentials we are equal."
"I see; but," Sir Basil still queried, "you wouldn't care about their parties, I suppose, and don't you think they might like your dinners? At least that's the way it would work out, I'm afraid, at home."
"Ah, it doesn't here. They are too civilized for that. Neither of us would feel fitted to the superficial aspects of the others' lives."
"We have that sort of thing in England, too, you know; only perhaps we look at it more from the other side, and recognize difference rather than sameness."
"Very much more, I think," said Imogen with a slight smile. "I should think that there was very little resemblance. Your social structure is a wholesome, natural growth, embodying ideals that, in the main, are unconscious. We started from that and have been building ever since toward conscious ideals."
"Well,"—Sir Basil passed over this simile, a little perplexed,—"it's very wonderful that they shouldn't feel—inferior, you know, in our ugly sense of the word, if they only get one side of friendship and not the other. Now that's how we manage in England, you see; but then I'm afraid it doesn't work out as you say it does here; I'm afraid they do feel inferior, after a fashion."
"Only the truly inferior could feel inferiority, since they get the real side of friendship," said Imogen, with gentle authority. "And I can't think that, in our sense of the word, the real side is given with you. There is conscious condescension, conscious adaptation to a standard supposed lower."
"I see; I see"; Sir Basil murmured, looking, while still perplexed, rather conscience-stricken; "yes, I suppose you're right."
Imogen looked as though she more than supposed it, and, feeling himself quite worsted, Sir Basil went on to ask her further questions about the club and kindergarten.
"What a lot of work it must all mean for you," he said.
"That, I think, is one's only right to the advantages one has—education, taste, inherited traditions," said Imogen, willing to enlighten this charmingly civilized, yet spiritually barbarous, interlocutor who followed her, tall, in his delightfully outdoor-looking garments, his tie and the tilt of his Panama hat answering her nicest sense of fitness, and his handsome brown face, quizzical, yet very attentive, meeting her eyes on its leafy background whenever she turned her head. "If they are not made instruments to use for others they rust in our hands and poison us," she said. "That's the only real significance of an aristocracy, a class fitted to serve, with the highest service, the needs of all. Of course, much of our best and deepest thought about these things is English; don't imagine me ungrateful to the noble thinkers of your—of my—race,—they have moulded and inspired us; but, there is the strange paradox of your civilization, your thought reacts so little on your life. Your idealists and seers count only for your culture, and even in your culture affect so little the automatic existence of your people. They form a little isolated class, a leaven that lies outside the lump. Now, with us, thought rises, works, ferments through every section of our common life."
Quite without fire, almost indolently, she spoke; very simply, too, glancing round at him, as though she could not expect much understanding from such an alien listener.
"I'm awfully glad, you know, to get you to talk to me like this," said Sir Basil, after a meditative pause; "I saw a good bit of you in New York, but you never talked much with me."
"You had mama to talk to."
"But I want to talk to you, too. You do a lot of thinking, I can see that."
"I try to"; she smiled a little at hisnaïveté.
"Your mother told me so much about you that I'm tremendously eager to know you for myself."
"Well, I hope that you may come to, for mama's pictures of me are not likely to be accurate," said Imogen mildly. "We don't think in the same way or see things in the same way and, though we are so fond of each other, we are not interested in the same things. Perhaps that is why I don't interest her particular friends. They would not find much in common between mama and me"; but her smile was now a little humorous and she was quite prepared for his "Oh, but, I assure you, I am interested in you."
Already, with her unerring instinct for power, Imogen knew that Sir Basil was interested in her. There was only, to be sure, a languid pleasure in the sense of power over a person already, as it were, so bespoken, so in bondage to other altars; but, though without a trace of coquetry, the smile quietly claimed him as a partial, a damaged convert. Imogen always knew when people were capable of being, as she expressed it to herself, "Hers." She made small effort for those who were without the capacity. She never misdirected such smiles upon Rose, or Miss Bocock, or Mrs. Wake. And now, as Sir Basil went on to asseverate, just behind her shoulder, his pleasant tones quite touched with eagerness, that the more he saw of her the more interested he became, she allowed him to draw her into a playful argument on the subject.
"Yes, I quite believe that you would like me—if you came to know me"—she was willing to concede at last; "but, no, indeed no, I don't think that you would ever feel much interest in me."
"You mean because I'm not sufficiently interesting myself? Is that it, eh?" Sir Basil acutely asked, reflecting that he had never seen a girl walk so beautifully or dress so exquisitely. The sunlight glittered in her hair.
"I don't mean that at all," said Imogen; "although I don't fancy that you are interested so deeply, and in so many things, as I am."
"Now, really! Why not? You haven't given me a chance to show you. Of courseI'm not clever."
"I meant nothing petty, like cleverness."
"You mean that I don't take life seriously enough to please you?"
"Not that, exactly. It's that we face in opposite directions, as it were. Life isn't to you what it is to me, it isn't to you such a big, beautiful thing, with so many wonderful vistas in it—such far, high peaks."
She was very grave now, and the gravity, the assurance, and, with them, the sweetness, of this young girl were charming and perplexing to Sir Basil. Girls so assured he had found harsh, disagreeable and, almost always, ugly; they had been the sort of girl one avoided. And girls so lovely had usually been coy and foolish. This girl walked like a queen, looked at one like a philosopher, smiled at one like an angel. He fixed his mind on her last words, rallying his sense of quizzical paternity to meet such disconcerting statements.
"Well, but you are very young; life looks like that—peaks, you know, and vistas, and all the rest—when one is young. You've not had time to find it out, to be disappointed," said Sir Basil.
Imogen's calm eye rested upon him, and even before she spoke he knew that he had made a very false step. It was as if, sunken to the knees in his foolish bog, he stood before her while she replied:
"Ah, it's that that is shallow in you, or, let us say, undeveloped, still to be able to think of life in those terms. They are the thoughts of an unawakened person, and some people, I know, go all through life without awaking. You imagine, I suppose, that I think of life as something that is going to give me happiness, to fulfil sentimental, girlish dreams. You are mistaken. I have known bitter disappointments, bitter losses, bitter shatterings of hope. But life is wonderful and beautiful to me because we can be our best and do our best in it, and for it, if we try. It's an immense adventure of the soul, an adventure that can disappoint only in the frivolous sense you were thinking of. Such joys are not the objects of our quest. One is disappointed with oneself, often, for falling so short of one's vision, and people whom we love and trust may fail us and give us piercing pain; but life, in all its oneness, is good and beautiful if we wake to its deepest reality and give our hearts to the highest that we know."
She spoke sadly, softly, surely, thinking of her own deep wounds, and to speak such words was almost like repeating a familiar lesson,—how often she had heard them on her father's lips,—and Sir Basil listened, while he looked at the golden head, at the white hand stretched out now and then to put aside a branch or sapling—listened with an amazement half baffled and wholly admiring. He had never heard a girl talk like that. He had heard such words before, often, of course, but they had never sounded like this; they seemed fresh, and sparkling with a heavenly dew, spoken so quietly, with such indifference to their effect, such calmness of conviction. The first impression of her, that always hovered near, grew more strongly upon him. There was something heavenly about this girl. It was as though he had heard an angel singing in the woods, and a feeling of humility stole over him. It was usual for Sir Basil, who rarely thought about himself, to feel modest, but very unusual for him to feel humble.
"You make me believe it, when you say it," he murmured. "I'm afraid you think me a dreadfully earthy, commonplace person."
Imogen, at the change of note in his voice, looked round at him, more really aware of him than she had been at all, and when she met his glance the prophet's calm fervor rose in her to answer the faith that she felt in him. She paused, letting him come abreast of her in the narrow path, and they both stood still, looking at each other.
"You are not earthy; you are not commonplace," said Imogen, then, as a result of her contemplation. "I believe that you are a very big person, Sir Basil."
"A big person? How do you mean?" He absolutely flushed, half abashed, half delighted.
Imogen continued to gaze, clearly and deeply. "There are all sorts of possibilities in you."
"Oh, come now! At my age! Why, any possibilities are over, except for a cheerful kind of vegetating."
"You have vegetated all your life, I can see that. No one has ever waked you. You have hardlyusedyour soul at all. It's with you as it is with your country, whose life is built strongly and sanely with body and brain but who has not felt nationally, as a whole, its spirit. Like it, you have a spirit; like it, you are full of possibilities."
"Miss Upton, you aren't like anybody I've ever known. What sort of possibilities?"
She walked on now, feeling his thrill echo in herself, symptomatic of the passing forth of power and its return as enrichment of life and inspiration to helpfulness. "Of service," she said. "Of devotion to great needs; courage in great causes. I don't think that you have ever had a chance."
Sir Basil, keeping his eyes on her straight, pale profile, groping and confused in this new flood of light, wondered if he had.
"You are an extraordinary young woman," he said at last. "You make me believe in everything you say, though it's so awfully queer, you know, to think in that way about myself. If you talk to me often like this, about needs and causes, will it give me more of a chance, do you think?"
"We must all win to the light for ourselves," said Imogen very gently, "but we can help one another."
They had come now to the edge of the wood and out upon the white road that curved from the village up to the blue of the hills they had descended. A tiny brook ran with a sharp, silvery tinkle on its farther edge and it was bordered by a light barrier of white railing. Beyond were spacious, half-cultivated meadows, stretched out for miles in the lap of low-lying hills.
Serene yet inhuman the landscape looked, a background to the thinnest of histories, significant only of its own dreaming solitude; and the village, among its elms, a little farther on, suggested the barest past, the most barren future. The road led on into its main street, where the elms made a stately avenue, arching over scattered frame houses of buff and gray and white. Imogen told Sir Basil that some of these houses were old, and pointed out an austere classic façade with pediment and pillars; explained to him, too, the pathetic condition of so much of abandoned New England. Sir Basil was thinking more of her last words in the woods than of local color, but he had, while he listened, a fairly definite impression of pinchbeck shops; of shabby awnings slanting in the sunlight over heaps of tumbled fruit and vegetables; of "buggies," slip-shod, with dust-whitened wheels, the long-tailed, long-maned, slightly harnessed horses hitched to posts along the pavements. The faces that passed were indolent yet eager. The jaws of many worked mechanically at some unappeasing task of mastication.
Sir Basil had traveled since his arrival in America, had seen the luxuries of the Atlantic seacoast, the purposeful energy of Chicago, California's Eden-like abundance, and had seen other New England villages where beauty was cherished and made permanent. He hardly needed Imogen's further comments to establish his sense of contrast.