"This was always a poor enough little place. Any people who made it count left it long ago. But even here," she went on, "even in its stagnation, one can find some of the things we care for in our country, some of the things we live for."
Some of these things seemed personified in the figure of the young woman who met them in the girls' club, among the shelves of books and the numerous framed photographs from the old masters. Imogen introduced Sir Basil to her and he watched her with interest while she and Imogen discussed some business matters. She was slender and upright, perhaps too upright; she was, in manner, unaffected and assured, perhaps too assured, but that Sir Basil did not observe. He found her voice unpleasant and her pronunciation faulty, but thought that she expressed herself with great force and fluency. Her eyes were bright, her skin sallow, she smiled gravely, and her calmness and her smile reminded Sir Basil a little of Imogen; perhaps they were racial. She was dressed in a simple gray cotton frock with neat lawn collar and cuffs, and her hair was raised in a lustrous "pompadour," a wide comb traversing it behind and combs at the sides of her head upholding it in front. Toward Sir Basil she behaved with gracious stateliness of demeanor, so that he wondered anew at the anomalies of a country of ideals where a young person so well-appearing should not be asked to dinner.
Several other girls came in while they were there, and they all surrounded Imogen with eager familiarity of manner; all displayed toward himself, as he was introduced, variations of Miss Hickson's stateliness. He thought it most delightful and interesting and the young women very remarkable persons. One discordant note, only, was struck in the harmony, and that discord was barely discerned by his untrained ear. While Imogen was talking, a girl appeared in the doorway, hesitated, then, with an indifferent and forbidding manner, strolled across the room to the book-shelves, where she selected a book, strolling out again with the barest nod of sullen recognition. She was a swarthy girl, robust and ample of form, with black eyes and dusky cheeks. Her torn red blouse and untidy hair marked her out from the sleek and social group. Sir Basil thought her very interesting looking. He asked Imogen, as they walked away under the elms, who she was. "That artistic young person, with the dark hair."
"Artistic? Do you mean Mattie Smith?—the girl with the bad manners?" askedImogen, smiling tolerantly.
"Yes, she looked like a clever young person. She belongs to the club?"
"She hardly counts as one of its members, though we welcome everyone, and, like all the girls of the village, she enjoys the use of our library. She is not clever, however. She is an envious and a rather ill-tempered girl, with very little of the spirit of sisterhood in her. And she nurses her defect of isolation and self-sufficiency. I hope that we may win her over to wider, sweeter outlooks some day."
Mattie Smith, however, was one of the people upon whom Imogen wasted no smiles. On the Uptons first coming to spend their summers near Hamborough, Imogen had found this indolent yet forcible personality barring her path of benignant activity. Mattie Smith, unaided, undirected, ignorant of the Time Spirit's high demands upon the individual, had already formed a club of sorts, a tawdry little room hung with bright bunting and adorned with colored pictures from the cheaper magazines, pictures of over-elegant, amorously inclined young couples in ball-rooms or on yachts and beaches. Here the girls read poor literature, played games, made candy over the stove and gossiped about their young men. Imogen deeply disapproved of the place; its ventilation was atrocious and its moral influence harmful; it relaxed and did not discipline,—so she had expressed it to her father. It soon withered under her rival beams. Mattie Smith's members drifted by degrees into the more advantageous alliance. Mattie Smith had resented this triumphant placing of the higher standard and took pains, as Imogen, with the calm displeasure of the successful, observed, to make difficulties for her and to treat her with ostentatious disregard. Imogen guessed very accurately at the seething of anger and jealousy that bubbled in Mattie Smith's breast; it was typical of so much of the lamentable spirit displayed by rudimentary natures when feeling the pressure of an ideal they did not share or when brought into contact with a more finished manner of life from which they were excluded. Imogen, too, could not have borne a rival ascendancy; but she was ascendant through right divine, and, while so acutely understanding Mattie Smith's state of mind, she could not recognize a certain sameness of nature. She hoped that Mattie Smith would "grow," but she felt that, essentially, she was not of the sort from which "hers" were made.
It was almost four o'clock by the time that Imogen and Sir Basil reached the summit of one of the lower hills, and, among the trees, came upon the white glimmer of the Upton's summer home. It stood in a wide clearing surrounded on three sides by the woods, the higher ranges rising about it, its lawn running down to slopes of long grass, thick with tall daisies and buttercups. Farther on was an orchard, and then, beyond the dip of a valley, the blue, undulating distance, bathed in a crystalline quivering. The house, of rough white stucco, had lintels and window-frames of dark wood, a roof of gray shingles, and bright green shutters. A wide veranda ran around it, wreathed in vines and creepers, and borders of flowers grew to the edges of the woods. Sir Basil thought that he had never seen anything prettier. Valerie, dressed in thin black, was sitting on the veranda, and beside her Miss Bocock, still in traveling dress, looked incongruously ungraceful. She had arrived an hour before with the Pottses, who had gone to their rooms, and said, in answer to Imogen's kindly queries, that the journey hadn't been bad, though the train was very stuffy. Then it appeared that Miss Bocock and Sir Basil were acquainted; they recollected each other, shook hands heartily, and asked and answered local questions. Miss Bocock's people lived not so many miles from Thremdon Hall, and, though she had been little at home of late years, she and Sir Basil had country memories in common. She said presently that she, too, would like to tidy for the tea, and Imogen, taking her to her room, sat with her while she smoothed out one section of her hair and tonged the other, and while she put on a very stiff holland skirt and a blouse distressing to Imogen's sensitive taste, a crude pink blouse, irrelevantly adorned about the shoulders with a deep frill of imitation lace. While she dressed she talked, in her high-pitched, cheerful voice, of the recent very successful lectures she had given in Boston and the acquaintances she had made there.
"I hope that my letters of introduction proved useful," said Imogen. She considered Miss Bocock herprotégée, but Miss Bocock, very vexatiously, seemed always oblivious of that fact; so that Imogen, though feeling that she had secured a guest who conferred luster, couldn't resist, now and then, trying to bring her to a slightly clearer sense of obligation.
Miss Bocock said that, yes, they had been very useful, and Imogen watched her select from the graceful nosegay on her dressing-table two red roses which she pinned to her pink blouse with a heavy silver brooch representing, in an encircling bough, a mother bird hovering with outstretched wings over a precariously placed nest.
"Let me get you a white rose," Imogen suggested; but Miss Bocock said, no, thanks, she was very fond of that shade of red.
"So you know Sir Basil," said Imogen, repressing her sense of irritation.
"Know him? Yes, of course. Everybody in the county knows him. He is the big man thereabouts, you see. The old squire, his father, was very fond of my father, and we go to a garden-party at the hall once a year or so. It's a nice old place."
Imogen felt some perplexity. "But if your father and his were such friends why don't you see more of each other?"
Miss Bocock looked cheerfully at her. "Why, because he is big and we aren't. We are middle-class and he very much upper; it's a very old family, the Thremdons,—I forget for how many generations they have been in Surrey. Now my dear old dad was only a country doctor," Miss Bocock went on, seated in a rocking-chair—she liked rocking-chairs—with her knees crossed, her horribly shaped patent-leather shoes displayed and her clear eyes, through their glasses, fixed on Imogen while she made these unshrinking statements; "and a country doctor's family hasn't much to do with county people."
"What an ugly thing," said Imogen, while, swiftly, her mind adjusted itself to this new seeing of Miss Bocock. By its illumination Miss Bocock's assurance toward herself grew more irritating than before, and the fact that Miss Bocock's flavor was very different from Sir Basil's became apparent.
"Not at all," said Miss Bocock. "It's a natural crystallization. You are working toward the same sort of thing over here—only not in such a wholesome way, I think."
Imogen flushed a little. "Our crystallizations, when they aren't artificially brought about by apings of your civilization, take place through real superiority and fitness. A woman of your intellectual ability is anybody's equal in America."
"Oh, as far as that goes, in that sense, I'm anybody's equal in England, too," said Miss Bocock, unperturbed and unimpressed.
Imogen rather wished she could make her feel that, since crystallizations were a fact, the Uptons, in that sense, were as much above her as the Thremdons. Idealist democrat as she counted herself, she had these quick glances at a standard kept, as it were, for private use; as if, from under an altar in the temple of humanity, its priest were to draw out for some personal reassurance a hidden yard-measure.
Tea, when they went down again, was served on the veranda and Imogen could observe, during its progress, that Miss Bocock showed none of the disposition to fawn on Sir Basil that one might have expected from a person of the middle-class. She contradicted him as cheerfully as she did Imogen herself.
Mr. and Mrs. Potts had gone for a little ramble in the lower woods, but they soon appeared, Mr. Potts seating himself limply on the steps and fanning himself with his broad straw hat—a hat that in its very largeness and looseness seemed to express the inflexible ideals of non-conformity—while Mrs. Potts, very firmly busked and bridled, her head very sleek, her smile very tight, took a chair between Mrs. Upton and Sir Basil, and soon showed, in her whole demeanor, a consciousness of the latter's small titular decoration that placed her more definitely for Imogen's eye than she had ever been placed before. The Pottses were middle-class with a vengeance. Imogen's irritation grew as she watched these limpet-like friends, one sprawling and ill-at-ease for all his careful languor, the other quite dreadfully well-mannered, sipping her tea, arching her brows and assuming all sorts of perilous elegancies of pronunciation that Imogen had never before heard her attempt. It was an additional vexation to have them display toward herself, with even more exaggeration than usual, their tenacious tenderness; listening, with a grave turning of head and eye when she spoke, and receiving each remark with an over-emphasis of feeling on their over-mobile features.
There was, indeed, an odd irony in the Pottses being there at all. They had, in her father's lifetime, only been asked with a horde of their kind, the whole uplifted batch thus worked off together, and Imogen had really not expected her mother to agree to her suggestion that they should be invited to pay the annual visit during Sir Basil's stay. She would not own to herself that her suggestion had been made from a vague wish to put her mother to a test, to force her into a definite declaration against the incongruous guests; she had thought of the suggestion, rather, as an upholding of her father's banner before the oncoming betrayal; but, instead of refusal, she had met with an instant, happy acquiescence, and it was now surely the climax of irony to see how her mother, for her sake, bore with them. More than for her sake, perhaps. Imogen detected in those seemingly indolent, yet so observant, eyes a keen reading of the Pottses' perturbed condition, and in her manner, so easy and so apt, the sweetest, lightest kindness. She turned corners and drew veils for them, spread a warm haze of interest and serenity about their clumsy and obtruding personalities. Imogen could even see that the Pottses were reconsidering, with some confusion of mind, their old verdict on her mother.
This realization brought to her brooding thoughts a sudden pang of self-reproach. It wouldn't do for the Pottses to find in her mother the cordiality they might miss in herself. She confessed that, for a moment, she had allowed the banner to trail in the dust of worldly thoughts, the banner to which the Pottses, poor dears, had rallied for so many loyal years. She summoned once more all her funds of spiritual appreciation and patience. As for Miss Bocock, she made not the slightest attempt to talk to the Pottses. She had come up with them from the station,—they had not found each other on the train,—and she had probably had her fill of them in that time. Once or twice, in the act of helping herself plentifully to cake, she paused to listen to them, and after that looked away, over their heads or through them, as if she finally dismissed them from the field of her attention. Mrs. Potts was questioning Sir Basil about his possible knowledge of her own English ancestry. "We came over in theMayflower, you know," she said.
"Really," said Sir Basil, all courteous interest.
"The Claremonts, you know," said Mrs. Potts, modestly, yet firmly, too. "My father was in direct descent; we have it all worked out in our family tree."
"Oh, really," said Sir Basil again.
"I've no doubt," said Mrs. Potts, "that your forebears and mine, Sir Basil, were friends and comrades in the spacious times of good Queen Bess."
Imogen, at this, glanced swiftly at her mother; but she caught no trace of wavering on that mild countenance.
"Oh, well, no," Sir Basil answered. "My people were very little country squires in those days; we didn't have much to do with the Dukes of Claremont. We only began to go up, you see, a good bit after you were on the top."
Imogen fixed a calm but a very cold eye upon Mrs. Potts. She had heard of the Dukes of Claremont for many years; so had everybody who knew Mrs. Potts; they were an innocent, an ingrained illusion of the good lady's, but to-day they seemed less innocent and more irritating than usual. Imogen felt that she could have boxed Mrs. Potts's silly ears. In Sir Basil's pleasant disclaimers, too, there was an echo of Miss Bocock's matter-of-fact acknowledgments that seemed to set them both leagues away from the Pottses and to make their likeness greater than their difference.
"Well, of course," Mrs. Potts was going on, herpince-nezand all her small features mingled, as it were, in the vividest glitter, "for me, I confess, it's blood, above all and beyond all, that counts; and you and I, Sir Basil, know that it is in the squirearchy that some of the best blood in England is found. We don't recognize an aristocracy in our country, Sir Basil, but, though not recognized, it rules,—blood must rule; one often, in a democracy, feels that as one's problem."
"It's only through service that it rules," Mr. Potts suddenly ejaculated from where he sat doubled on the steps looking with a gloomy gaze into the distance. "Service; service—that's our watchword. Lend a hand."
Imogen saw a latent boredom piercing Sir Basil's affability. Great truths uttered by some lips might be made to seem very unefficacious. She proposed to him that she should show him the wonderful display of mountain-laurel that grew higher up among the pine-woods. He rose with alacrity, but Mrs. Potts rose too. Imogen could hardly control her vexation when, nipping the crumbs from her lap and smoothing the folds at her waist, she declared that she was just in the humor for a walk and must see the laurel with them.
"You mustn't tire yourself. Wouldn't you rather stay and have another cup of tea and talk to me?" Mrs. Upton interposed, so that Imogen felt a dart of keen gratitude for such comprehension; but Mrs. Potts was not to be turned aside from her purpose. "Thank you so much, dear Mrs. Upton," she answered; "we must have many, many talks indeed; but I do want to see my precious Imogen, and to see the laurel with her. You are one of those rare beings, darling Imogen, with whom one cansharenature. Will you come, too, Delancy, dear?" she asked her husband, "or will you stay and talk to Mrs. Upton and Miss Bocock? I'm sure that they will be eager to hear of this new peace committee of ours and zestful to help on the cause."
Mr. Potts rather sulkily said that he would stay and talk to Mrs. Upton and Miss Bocock about the committee, and Imogen felt that it was in a manner of atonement to him for her monopolization of a lustrous past that Mrs. Potts presently, as they began the steep ascent along a winding, mossy path, told Sir Basil that her husband, too, knew the responsibility and burden of "blood." And as, for a moment, they went before her, Imogen fancied that she heard the murmur of quite a new great name casting its ægis about Mr. Potts. Very spiritual people could, she reflected, become strangely mendacious when borne along on the wings of ardor and exaltation.
Mrs. Potts's presence was really quite intolerable, and, as she walked behind her and listened to her murmur, Imogen bethought her of an amusing, though rather ruthless, plan of elimination. Imogen was very capable of ruthlessness when circumstances demanded it. Turning, therefore, suddenly to the right, she led them into a steep and rocky path that, as she well knew, would eventually prove impassable to Mrs. Potts's short legs and stiff, fat person. Indeed, Mrs. Potts soon began to pant and sigh. Her recital of the family annals became disconnected; she paused to take off and rub her eyeglasses and presently asked, in extenuated tones, if this were the usual path to the laurel.
"It's the one I always take, dear Mrs. Potts; it's the one I wanted Sir Basil to see, it's so far the lovelier. One gets the most wonderful, steep views down into far depths of blue," Imogen, perched like a slender Valkyrie on the summit of a crag above, thus addressed her perturbed friend.
She couldn't really but be amused by Mrs. Potts's pertinacity, for, not yet relinquishing her purpose, she continued, in silence now, her lips compressed, her forehead beaded with moisture, to scale the difficult way, showing a resolute nimbleness amazing in one so ill-formed for feats of agility. Sir Basil gave her a succoring hand while Imogen soared ahead, confident of the moment when Mrs. Potts, perforce, must fall back.
"Tiresome woman!" she thought, but she couldn't help smiling while she thought it, and heard Mrs. Potts's deep breath laboring up behind her. It was, perhaps, rather a shame to balk her in this way; but, after all, she was to have a full fortnight of Sir Basil and she, Imogen, felt that on this day, the day of a new friendship, Sir Basil's claim on her was paramount. She had something for him, a light, a strengthening, and she must keep the hour sacred to that stir of awakening. Among the pines and laurels she would say a few more words of help to him. So that Mrs. Potts must be made to go.
The moment came. A shoulder of rock overhung the way and the only passage was over its almost perpendicular surface. Imogen, as if unconscious of difficulty, with a stride, a leap, a swift clutch of her firm white hand, was at the top, smiling down at them and saying: "Now here the view is our very loveliest. One looks down for miles."
"But—my dear Imogen—is there no other way, round it, perhaps?" Mrs. Potts looked desperately into the thick underbrush on either side.
"No other way," said Imogen. "But you can manage it. This is only the beginning,—there's some real climbing farther on. Put your foot where I did—no, higher—near the little fern—your hand here, look, do you see? Take a firm hold of that—then a good spring—and here you are."
Poor Mrs. Potts laid a faltering hand on the high ledge that was only a first stage in the chamois-like feat, and Imogen saw unwilling relinquishment in her eye.
"I don't see as I can do it," she murmured, relapsing, in her distress, into a helpless vernacular.
"Oh, yes, this is nothing. Sir Basil will give you a push. I'll pull you and he will push you," Imogen, with kindest solicitude, suggested.
"Oh, I don't see as Ican," Mrs. Potts repeated, looking rather wild at the vision of such a push. She didn't at all lend herself to pushes, and yet, facing even the indignities of that method, she did, though faltering, place herself in position; did lay a desperate hold of the high ledge, place her small, fat, tightly buttoned foot high beside the fern; allow Sir Basil, with a hand under each armpit, to kindly count "One-two-three—now for it!"—did even, at the word of command, make a passionate jump, only to lose hold, scrape lamentably down the surface of the rock, and collapse into his arms.
"Oh, I'm so sorry!" said Imogen, looking down upon them while Sir Basil placed Mrs. Potts upon her feet, and while Mrs. Potts, angered almost to tears, rubbed with her handkerchief at the damage done to her dress. "I'm soverysorry, dear Mrs. Potts. I see that it is a little too steep for you. And I did so want you to see this view."
"I shall have to go back. I am very tired, quite exhausted," said Mrs. Potts, in a voice that slightly shook. "I wish you had taken the usual path. I never dreamed that we were setting out on such a—such a violent expedition."
"But this is my usual path," said Imogen, opening her eyes. "I've never found it hard. And I wanted you and Sir Basil to see my view. But, dear Mrs. Potts, let me go back with you. Sir Basil won't mind finding his way alone, I'm sure."
"Oh, no, thanks! No, I couldn't think of spoiling your walk. No, I will go back," and Mrs. Potts, turning away, began to retrace her steps.
"Be sure and lie down and rest; take a little nap before dinner," Imogen called after her.
Mrs. Potts disappeared, and Imogen, when she and Sir Basil stood together on the fortunate obstacle, said: "Poor, excellent creature. Iamsorry. She is displeased with me. I ought to have remembered that this was too rough for her and taken the other path." Indeed, she had felt rather guilty as Mrs. Potts's back, the ridge of its high stays strongly marked by the slanting sunlight, descended among the sylvan scenery.
"Yes, and she did so want to come, awfully keen on it," said Sir Basil; "but I hope you won't think me very brutal if I confess thatI'mnot sorry. I want to talk to you, you see," Sir Basil beamed.
"I would rather talk to you, too," Imogen smiled. "My good old friend can be very wearisome. But it was thoughtless of me to have brought her on this way."
They rested for a little while on their rock, looking down into the distance that was, indeed, worth any amount of climbing. And afterward, when they reached the fairyland where the laurel drifted through the pine woods, and as she quoted "Wood-Notes" to him and pointed out to him the delicate splendors of the polished green, the clear, cold pink, on a background of gray rock, Imogen could but feel her little naughtiness well justified. It was delightful to be there in solitude with Sir Basil, and the sense of sympathy that grew between her and this supplanter of her father's was strange, but not unsweet. It wasn't only that she could help him, and that that was always a claim to which one must respond, but she liked helping him.
On the downward way, a little tired from the rapidity of her ascent, she often gave her hand to Sir Basil as she leaped from rock to rock, and they smiled at each other without speaking, already like the best of friends.
That evening, as she was going down to dinner, Imogen met her mother on the stairs. They spoke little to each other during these days. Imogen felt that her neutrality of attitude could best be maintained by silence.
"Mrs. Potts came back," her mother said, smiling a little, and, Imogen fancied, with the old touch of timidity that she remembered in her. "She said that you took her on a most fearful climb."
"What foolishness, poor dear Mrs. Potts! I took her along the upper path."
"The upper path! Is there an upper path?" Mrs. Upton descended beside her daughter. "I thought that it was the usual path that had proved too much for her."
"I wanted them to see the view from the rock," said Imogen; "I forgot that poor Mrs. Potts would find it too difficult a climb."
"Oh, I remember, now, the rock! That is a difficult climb," said Mrs.Upton.
Imogen wondered if her mother guessed at why Mrs. Potts had been taken on it. She must feel it of good augury, if she did, that her daughter should already like Sir Basil enough to indulge in such an uncharitable freak. Imogen felt her color rise a little as she suspected herself and her motives revealed. It was not that she wasn't quite ready to own to a friendship with Sir Basil; but she didn't want friendship to be confused with condonation, and she didn't like her mother to guess that she could use Mrs. Potts uncharitably.
Her magnanimity toward Jack—so Imogen more and more clearly saw it to have been—at the time of their parting, had made it inevitable that he should hold to his engagement to visit them that summer, and even because of that magnanimity, she felt, in thinking over again and again the things that Jack had said of her and to her, a deepening of the cold indignation that the magnanimity had quelled at the moment of his speaking them. Mingling with the sense of snapped and bleeding ties was a longing, irrepressible, profound, violent, that he might be humiliated, punished, brought to his knees in penitence and abasement.
Her friendship with Sir Basil, his devotion to her, must be, though by no means humiliating, something of a coal of fire laid on Jack's traitorous head; and she saw at once that he was pleased, touched, but perplexed, by what must seem to him an unforeseen smoothing of her mother's path. He was there, she guessed, far more to see that her mother's path was made smooth than to try and straighten out their own twisted and separate ways. He had come for her mother, not for her; and Imogen did not know whether it was more pain or anger that the realization gave her.
What puzzled him, what must have puzzled her mother, must puzzle, indeed, anyone who perceived it,—except, no doubt, the innocent Sir Basil himself,—was that this friendship took up most of Sir Basil's time.
To Sir Basil she stood for something lofty and exquisite that did not, of course, clash with more rudimentary, if deeper, affections, but that, perforce, made them stand aside for the little interlude where it soared and sang. There was, for Imogen, a sharp sweetness in this fact and in Jack's bewildered appreciation of it, though for her own consciousness the triumph was no satisfying one. After all, of what use was it to soar and sing if Sir Basil were to drop to earth so inevitably and so soon? Outwardly, at all events, this unforeseen change in the situation gave her all the advantage in her meeting with Jack. She was not the reproved and isolated creature that he might have expected to find. She was not the helpless girl, subjugated by an alien mother and cast off by a faithless lover. No; calm, benignant, lovely, she had turned to other needs; one was not helpless while one helped; not small when others looked up to one.
Under her calm was the lament; under her unfaltering smile, the loneliness and the burning of that bitter indignation; but Jack could not guess at that, and if both felt difficulty in the neatly balanced friendship pledged under the wisteria, if there was a breathlessness for both in the tight-rope performance,—where one false step might topple one over into open hostility, or else, who knew, into complete surrender,—it was Imogen who gained composure from Jack's nervousness, and while he walked the rope with a fluttering breath and an anxious eye she herself could show the most graceful slides and posturings in midair.
It was evident enough to everybody that the relation was a changed, a precarious one, but all the seeming danger was Jack's alone.
Imogen, while she swung and balanced, often found her mother's eye fixed on her with a deep preoccupation, and guessed that it was owing to her mother's tactics that most of hertête-à-têteswith Jack were due. Her poor mother might imagine that she thus secured the solid foundation of the earth for their footsteps, but Imogen knew that never was the rope so dizzily swung as when she and Jack were thus gently coerced into solitude together.
It was, however, a few days after Jack's arrival, and a few days before the Pottses' departure, that an interest came to her of such an absorbing nature that it wrapped her mind away from the chill or scorching sense of her own wrongs. It was with the Pottses that the plan originated, and though the Pottses were proving more trying than they had ever been, they caught some of the radiance of their own proposal. As instruments in a great purpose, she could look upon them more patiently, though, more than ever, it would need tact to prevent them from shadowing the brightness that they offered. The plan, apparently, had been with them for some time, its disclosure delayed until the moment suited to its seriousness and sanctity, and it was then, between the three, mapped out and discussed carefully before they felt it ripe for further publicity. Then it was Imogen who told them that the time had come for the unfolding to her mother, and Imogen who led them, on a sunny afternoon, into her mother's little sitting-room where she sat writing at her desk.
Jack was there, reading near the window that opened upon the veranda, but his presence was not one to make the occasion less intimate, and Imogen was glad of it. It was well that he should be a witness to what she felt to be a confession of faith, a confession that needed explicit defining, and of a faith that he and all the others, by common consent, seemed banded together to ignore.
So, with something of the air of a lovely verger, she led her primed pair into the room and pointed out two chairs to them.
Valerie, in her thin black draperies, looked pale and jaded. She turned from her desk, keeping her pen in her hand, and Imogen detected in her eye, as it rested upon the Pottses, a certain impatience.
Tison, suddenly awakening, broke into passionate barking; he had from the moment of Mr. Potts's arrival shown toward him a pronounced aversion, and, backed under the safe refuge of his mistress's chair, his sharp hostility disturbed the ceremonious entrance.
"Please put the dog out, Jack," said Imogen; "we have a very serious matter to talk over with mama." But Valerie, stooping, caught him up, keeping a soothing hand on his still defiant head, while Mr. Potts unfolded the plan before her.
The wonderful purpose, the wonderful project, was that Mr. Potts, aided by Imogen, should write the life of the late Mr. Upton; and as the curtain was drawn from before the shrined intention, Imogen saw that her mother flushed deeply.
"His name must not be allowed to die from among us, Mrs. Upton. His ideals must become more widely the ideals of his countrymen." Mr. Potts, crossing his knees and throwing back his shoulders, wrapped one hand, while he spoke, in a turn of his flowing beard. "They are in crying need of such a message, now, when the tides of social materialism and political corruption are at their height. We may well say, to paraphrase the great poet's words: 'Upton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; New York hath need of thee.' And this need is one that it is our duty, and our high privilege, to satisfy." Mr. Potts's eye, heavy with its responsibility, dwelt on Valerie's downcast face. "No one, I may say it frankly, Mrs. Upton, is more fitted than I to satisfy that need and to hand on that message. No one had more opportunity than I for understanding that radiant personality in its public aspects. No one can feel more deeply than I that duty and that privilege. Every American child should know the name of Upton; every American man and woman should count him among the prophets of his generation. He did not ask for fame, and we, his followers, ask none for him. No marble temple, no effulgent light of stained glass;—no. But the violets and lilies of childhood laid upon his grave; the tearful, yet joyous whisper of those who come to share his spirit:—'I, too, am of his race. I, too, can with him strive and with him achieve.'" Mr. Potts's voice had risen, and Tison, once more, gave a couple of hoarse, smothered barks.
Imogen, though reared on verbal bombast, had found some difficulty in maintaining her expression of uplifted approbation while Mr. Potts's rhetoric rolled; her willingness that Mr. Potts should serve the cause did not blind her to his inadequacy unless kept under the most careful control; and now, though incensed by Tison's interjection, she felt it as something of a relief, seizing the opportunity of Mr. Potts's momentary confusion to suggest, in a gentle and guarded voice:—"You might tell mama now, Mr. Potts, how we want her to help us."
"I am coming to that, Miss Imogen," said Mr. Potts, with a drop from sonority to dryness;—"I was approaching that point when the dog interrupted me"; and Mr. Potts cast a very venomous glance upon Tison.
"Had not the dog better be removed, Mrs. Upton?" Mrs. Potts, under her breath, murmured, leaning, as if in a pew and above prayer books, forward in her chair. But Mrs. Upton seemed deaf to the suggestion.
Mr. Potts cleared his throat and resumed somewhat tersely:—"This is our project, Mrs. Upton, and we have come this afternoon to ask you for your furtherance of it. You, of course, can provide me and Miss Imogen with many materials, inaccessible otherwise, for this our work of love. Early letters, to you;—early photographs;—reminiscences of his younger days, and so on. Any suggestion as to the form and scope of the book we will be glad, very glad, to consider."
Valerie had listened without a word or gesture, her pen still held in one hand, Tison pressed to her by the other, as she sat sideways to the writing-table. Imogen read in her face a mingled embarrassment and displeasure.
"I am sure we must all be very grateful to Mr. Potts for this great idea of his, mama dear," she said. "I thought of it, of course, as soon as papa died; I knew that we all owed it to him, and to the country that he loved and served so well; but I did not see my way, and have not seen it till now. I've so little technical knowledge. But now I shall contribute a little memoir to the biography and, in any other way, give Mr. Potts all the aid I can. And we hope that you will, too. Papa's name is one that must not be allowed to fade."
"I would rather talk of this at some other time, and with Mr. Potts alone,"Valerie now said, not raising her eyes.
"But mama, this is my work, too. I must be present when it is talked of."
"No, Jack, don't go," said Valerie, looking up at the young man, who had made a gesture of rising. "You and I, Imogen, will speak of this together, and I will find an hour, later, when I will be free to talk to Mr. Potts."
"Mama darling," said Imogen, masking her rising anger in patient playfulness, "you are a lazy, postponing person. You are not a bit busy, and this is just the time to talk it over with us all. Of course Jack must stay; we want his advice, too, severe critic as we know him to be. Come, dear, put down that pen." She bent over her and drew the pen from her hand while Mr. Potts watched the little scene, old suspicions clouding his countenance.
"My time is limited, Mrs. Upton," he observed; "Mrs. Potts and I take our departure to-morrow and, if I have heard aright, you expect acquaintances to dinner. Therefore, if you will pardon me, I must ask you to let us have the benefit, here and now, of your suggestions."
Valerie had not responded by any smile to Imogen's rather baleful lightness, nor did she, by any penitence of look, respond to Mr. Potts's urgency. She sat silent for a moment, and when she spoke it was in a changed voice, dulled, monotonous. "If you insist on my speaking, now—and openly,—I must say to you that I altogether disapprove of your project. You will never," said Valerie, with a rising color, "gain my consent to it."
A heavy silence followed her words, the only sound that of Tison's faint sniffings, as, his nose outstretched and moving from side to side, he cautiously savored the air in Mr. Potts's direction. Mrs. Potts stirred slightly, and uttered a sharp, "Tht—tht." Mr. Potts, his hand still stayed in his beard, gazed from under the fringed penthouse of his brows with an arrested, bovine look.
It was Imogen who broke the silence. Standing beside her mother she had felt the shock of a curious fulfilment go through her, as if she had almost expected to hear what she now heard. She mastered her voice to ask:—"We must demand your reasons for this—this very strange attitude, mama."
Her mother did not raise her eyes. "I don't think that your father was a man of sufficient distinction to justify the publishing of his biography."
At this Mr. Potts breathed a deep, indignant volume of sound, louder than a sigh, less articulate than a groan, through the forests of his beard.
"Sufficient distinction, Mrs. Upton! Sufficient distinction! You evidently are quite ignorant of how great was the distinction of your late husband. Ask us what that distinction was—ask any of his large circle of friends. It was a distinction not of mind only, nor of birth and breeding—though that was of the highest that this country has fostered—but it was a distinction also of soul and spirit. Your husband, Mrs. Upton, fought with speech and pen the iniquities of his country, the country that, as Miss Imogen has said, he loved and served. He served, he loved, with mind and heart and hand. He was the moving spirit in all the great causes of his day, the vitalizing influence that poured faith and will-power into them. He founded the cooperative community of Clackville; he organized the society of the 'Doers' among our young men;—he was a patron of the arts; talent was fostered, cheered on its way by him;—I can speak personally of three young friends of mine—noble boys—whom he sent to Paris at his own expense for the study of music and painting; when the great American picture is painted, the great American symphony composed, it will be, in all probability, to your husband that the country will owe the unveiling of its power. And above all, Mrs. Upton, above all,"—Mr. Potts's voice dropped to a thunderous solemnity,—"his character, his personality, his spirit, were as a light shining in darkness to all who had the good fortune to know him, and that light cannot, shall not, be cribbed, cabined and confined to a merely private capacity. It is a public possession and belongs to his country and to his age."
Tison, all unheeded now, had leapt to the floor and, during this address, had stood directly in front of the speaker, barking furiously until Imogen, her lips compressed, her forehead flushed, stooped, picked him up, and flung him out of the room.
Mrs. Upton had sat quite motionless, only lifting her glance now and then to Mr. Potts's shaking beard and flashing eye. And, after another pause, in which only Mr. Potts's deep breathing was heard,—and the desperate scratching at the door of the banished Tison,—she said in somber tones:—"I think you forget, Mr. Potts, that I was never one of my husband's appreciators. I am sorry to be forced to recall this fact to your memory."
It had been in all their memories, of course, a vague, hovering uncertainty, a dark suspicion that one put aside and would not look at. But to have it now placed before them, and in these cold, these somber tones, was to receive an icy douche of reality, to be convicted of over-ready hope, over-generous confidence.
It was Imogen, again, who found words for the indignant deputation: "Is that lamentable fact any reason why those who do appreciate him should not share their knowledge with others?"
"I think it is;—I hope so, Imogen," her mother replied, not raising her eyes to her.
"You tell us that your own ignorance and blindness is to prevent us from writing my father's life?"
"My opinion of your father's relative insignificance is, I think, a sufficient reason."
"Do you quite realize the arrogance of that attitude?"
"I accept all its responsibility, Imogen."
"Butwecannot accept it in you," said Imogen, her voice sinking to the hard quiver of reality that Jack well knew;—"wecan't fail in our duty to him because you have always failed in yours.Weare in no way bound to consider you-who never considered him."
"Imogen," said her mother, raising her eyes with a look of command; "you forget yourself. Be still."
Imogen's face froze to stone. Such words, such a look, she had never met before. She stood silent, helpless, rage and despair at her heart.
But Mr. Potts did not lag behind his duty. His hand still wrapped, Moses-like, in his beard, his eyes bent in holy wrath upon his hostess, he rose to his feet, and Mrs. Potts, in recounting the scene—one of the most thrilling of her life—always said that never had she seen Delancy so superblytrue, never had she seen blood sotell.
"I must say to you, Mrs. Upton, with the deepest pain," he said, "that I agree with Miss Imogen. I must inform you, Mrs. Upton, that you have no right, legal or moral, to bind us by your own shortcoming. Miss Imogen and I may do our duty without your help or consent."
"I have nothing more to say to you, Mr. Potts," Valerie replied. She had, unseeingly, taken up her pen again and, with a gesture habitual to her, was drawing squares and crosses on the blotter under her hand. The lines trembled. The angles of the squares would not meet.
"But I have still something to say to you, Mrs. Upton," said Mr. Potts; "I have still to say to you that, much as you have shocked and pained us in the past, you have never so shocked and pained us as now. We had hoped for better things in you,—wider lights, deeper insights, the unsealing of your eyes to error and wrong in yourself; we had hoped that sorrow would work its sacred discipline and that, with your daughter's hand to guide you, you were preparing to follow, from however far a distance, in the footsteps of him who is gone. This must count for us, always, as a dark day of life, when we have seen a human soul turn wilfully from the good held out to it and choose deliberately the evil. I speak for myself and for Mrs. Potts—and in sorrow rather than in wrath, Mrs. Upton. I say nothing of your daughter; I bow my head before that sacred filial grief. I—"
But here, suddenly, quiet, swift, irresistible as a flame, Jack rose from his place. It seemed one suave, unbroken motion, that by which he laid a hand on Mr. Potts's shoulder, a hand on Mrs. Potts's shoulder—she had risen in wonder and alarm at the menacing descent upon her lord—laid a hand on each, swept them to the door, opened it, swept them out, and shut the door upon them. Then he turned and leaned upon it, his arms folded.
"Perhaps, Jack, you wish to put me out, too," said Imogen in a voice of ice and fire. "Your arguments are conclusive. I hope that mama approves her champion."
Valerie now seemed to lean heavily on the table; she rested her forehead on her hand, covering her eyes.
"Have you anything to say to me, mama, before Jack executes his justice on me?" Imogen asked.
"Spare me, Imogen," her mother answered.
"Have you sparedme?" said Imogen. "Have you spared my father? What right have you to ask for mercy? You are a cruel, a shallow, a selfish woman, and you break my heart as you broke his. Now Jack, you need not put me out. I will go of myself."
When Jack had closed the door on her, he still stood leaning against it at a distance from Valerie. He saw that she wept, bitterly and uncontrollably; but, at first, awed by her grief, he did not dare approach her. It was only when the sobs were quieted that he went and stood near her.
"You were right, right," he almost whispered.
She did not answer, and wept on as if there could be no consolation for her in such rightness.
"It had to come," said Jack; "she had to be made to understand. And—you are right."
She was not thinking of herself. "Oh, Jack Jack," she spoke at last, putting out her hand to his and grasping it tightly "How I have hurt her. Poor Imogen;—my poor, poor child."
Imogen hardly knew where she went, or how, when she left her mother—her mother and Jack—and darted from the house on the wings of a supreme indignation, a supreme despair. Her sense of fitness was not that of Mr. Potts, and she knew that her father's biography was doomed. Against her mother's wish it could not, with any grace, any dignity, be published. Mr. Potts would put forth appreciation of his departed chief in the small, grandiloquent review to which he contributed—he had only delayed because of the greater project—but such a tribute would be a sealing of public failure rather than the kindling of public recognition. Already her father, by that larger public, was forgotten—forgotten; Mr. Potts would not make him remembered.
The word "forgotten" seemed like the beat of dark, tragic wings, bearing her on and on. The fire of a bitter wrong burned in her. And it was not the sense of personal wrong—though that was fierce,—that made her flight so blind and headlong—not her mother's cruelty nor Jack's sinister espousal of the cause he saw as evil; it was this final, this culminating wrong to her father. His face rose before her, while she fled, the deep, dark eyes dwelling with persistence on her as though they asked,—she seemed to hear the very words and in his very voice:—"What have they done to me, little daughter? Did I deserve this heaping of dust upon my name;—and from her hands?"
For it was that. Dust, the dust of indifferent time, of cold-hearted oblivion, was drifting over him, hiding his smile, his eyes, his tears. It seemed to mount, to suffocate her, as she ran, this dust, strewn by her mother's hand. Even in her own heart she had known the parching of its drifting fall, known that crouching doubts—not of him, never of him—but of his greatness, had lurked in ambush since her mother had come home;—known that the Pottses and their fitness had never before been so clearly seen for the little that they were since her mother—and all that her mother had brought—had come into her life. And, before this drifting of dust upon her faith in her father's greatness, her heart, all that was deepest in it, broke into a greater trust, a greater love, sobs beneath it. He was not great, perhaps, as the world counted greatness; but he was good, good,—he was sorrowful and patient. He loved her as no one had ever loved her. His ideals were hers and her love was his. Dust might lie on his tomb; but never, never, in her heart.
"Ah, it's cruel! cruel! cruel!" she panted, as she ran, ran, up the rocky, woodland path, leaping from ledge to ledge, slipping on the silky moss, falling now and then on hands and knees, but not pausing or faltering until she reached the murmuring pine-woods, the grassy, aromatic glades where the mountain-laurel grew.
Pallid, disheveled, with tragic, unseeing eyes and parted lips—the hollowed eyes, the sorrowful lips of a classic mask—she rushed from the shadows of the mountain—path into this place of sunlight and solitude. A doomed, distraught Antigone.
And so she looked to Sir Basil, who, his back against a warm rock, a cigarette in one lazy hand, was outstretched there before her on the moss, a bush of flowering laurel at his head, and, at his feet, beyond tree-tops, the steep, far blue of the lower world. He was gazing placidly at this view, empty of thought and even of conscious appreciation, wrapped in a balmy contentment, when, with the long, deep breath of a hunted deer, Imogen leaped from darkness into light, and her face announced such disaster that, casting aside the cigarette, springing to his feet, he seized her by the arms, thinking that she might fall before him. And indeed she would have cast herself face downward on the grass had he not been there; and she leaned forward on his supporting hands, speechless, breathing heavily, borne down by the impetus of her headlong run. Then, her face hidden from him as she leaned, she burst into sobs.
"Miss Upton!—Imogen!—My dear child!—" said Sir Basil, in a crescendo of distress and solicitude.
She leaned there on his hands weeping so bitterly and so helplessly that he finished his phrase by putting an arm around her, and so more effectually supporting her, so satisfying, also, his own desire to comfort and caress her.
The human touch, the human tenderness—though him she hardly realized—drew her grief to articulateness. "Oh—my father!—my father!—Oh—what have they done to you!" she gasped, leaning her forehead against Sir Basil's shoulder.
"Your father?" Sir Basil repeated soothingly, since this departed personality seemed a menace that might easily be dealt with, "What is it? What have they done? How can I help you? My dear child, do treat me as a friend. Do tell me what is the matter."
"It's mama! mama!—she has broken my heart—as she broke his," sobbed Imogen, finding her former words. Already, such was the amazing irony of events, Sir Basil seemed, more than anyone in the world, to take that dead father's place, to help her in her grief over him. The puzzle of it inflicted a deeper pang. "I can't tell you," she sobbed. "But I can never, never forgive her!"
"Forgive your mother?" Sir Basil repeated, shocked. "Don't, I beg of you, speak so. It's some misunderstanding."
"No!—No!—It is understanding—it is the whole understanding! It has come out at last—the truth—the dreadful truth."
"But can't you tell me? can't you explain?"
She lifted her face and drew away from him as she said, pressing her handkerchief to her eyes: "You never knew him. You cannot care for him—no one who cares, as much as you do, for her,—can ever care for him."
Sir Basil had deeply flushed. He led her to the sunny rock and made her sit down on a low ledge, where she leaned forward, her face in her hands, long sighs of exhaustion succeeding her tears. "I know nothing about your father, as you say, and I do care, very much, for your mother," said Sir Basil after a little while. "But I care for you, very much, too."
"Ah, but you could never care for me so much as to think her wrong."
"I don't know about that. Why not?—if she is wrong. One often thinks people one is fond of very wrong. Do you know," and Sir Basil now sat down beside her, a little lower, on the moss, "do you know you'll make me quite wretched if you won't have confidence in me. I really can't stand seeing you suffer and not know what it's about. I don't—I can't feel myself such a stranger as that. Won't you think of me," he took one of her hands and held it as he said this, "won't you think of me as, well, as a sort of affectionate old brother, you know? I want to be trusted, and to see if I can't help you. Don't be afraid," he added, "of being disloyal—of making me care less, you know, for your mother, by anything you say; for you wouldn't."
Leaning there, her face hidden, while she half heard him, it struck her suddenly, a shaft of light in darkness, that, indeed, he might help her. She dropped her hand to look at him and, with all its tear-stained disfigurement, he thought that he had never seen anything more heavenly than that look. It sought, it sounded him, pleaded with and caressed him. And, with all its solemnity, there dawned in it a tenderness deeper than any that he had ever seen in her.
"I do trust you," she said. "I think of you as a near, a dear friend. And, since you promise me that it will change you in nothing, I will tell you. I believe that perhaps you can help us,—my father and me. You must count me with him, you know, always. We want to write a life of him, Mr. Potts and I. Mr. Potts—you may have seen it—is an ordinary person, ordinary but for one thing, one great and beautiful thing that papa and I always felt in him,—and that beautiful thing is his depth of unselfish devotion to great causes and to good people. He worked for my father like a faithful, loving dog. He had an accurate knowledge of all the activities that papa's life was given to—all the ideals it aimed at and attained—yes, yes, attained,—whatever they may say. He has a very skilful pen, and is in touch with the public press. So, though I would, of course, have wished for a more adequate biographer, I was glad and proud to accept his offer; and I would have overlooked, revised, everything. We felt,—and by we, I mean not only Mr. and Mrs. Potts, but all his many, many friends, all those whose lives he loved and helped and lifted—that we owed it to the world he served not to let his name fade from among us. You cannot dream, Sir Basil, of what sort of man my father was. His life was one long devotion to the highest things, one long service of the weak and oppressed, one long battle with the wrong. Those who are incapable of following him to the heights can give you no true picture of him. I will say nothing, in this respect, of mama, except that she could not follow him,—and that she made him very, very unhappy, and with him, me. For I shared all his griefs. She left us; she laughed at all the things we cared and worked for. My father never spoke bitterly of her; his last words, almost, were for her, words of tenderness and pity and forgiveness. He had the capacity that only great souls have, of love for littler natures. I say this much so that you may know that any idea that you may have gathered of my father is, perforce, a garbled, a false one. He was a noble, a wonderful man. Everything I am I owe to him."
Imogen had straightened herself, the traces of weeping almost gone, her own fluency, as was usual with her, quieting her emotion, even while her own and her father's wrongs, thus objectivized in careful phrases, made indignation at once colder and deeper. Her very effort to quell indignation, to command her voice to an even justice of tone before this lover of her mother's, gave it a resonant quality, curiously impressive. And, as she looked before her, down into the blue profundities, the sense of her own sincerity seemed to pulse back to her from her silent listener, and filled her with a growing consciousness of power over him.
"This morning," she took up her theme on that resonant note, deepened to a tragic pitch, "we went to mama—Mr. Potts and I—to tell her of our project of commemoration, to ask her coöperation. We wanted to be very generous with her, to take her help and her sympathy for granted. I should have felt it an insult to my mother had I told Mr. Potts that we must carry on our work without consulting her. She received us with cold indifference. She tried not to listen, when she heard what our errand was. And her indifference became hostility, when she understood. All her old hatred for what he was and meant, all her fundamental antagonism to the purpose of his life—and to him—came at last, openly, to the light. She was forced to reveal herself. Not only has she no love, no reverence for him, but she cannot bear that others should learn to love him and to reverence him. She sneered at his claim to distinction; she refused her consent to our project. It is a terrible thing for me to say—but I must—and you will understand me—you who will not care less for her because she is so wrong—what I feel most of all in her attitude is a childish, yet a cruel, jealousy. She cannot endure that she should be so put into the dark by the spreading of his light. The greater his radiance is shown to be, the more in the wrong will all her life be proved;—it is that that she will not hear of. Shewantshim to be obscure, undistinguished, negligible, because it's that that she has always thought him."
Sir Basil, while she spoke, had kept his eyes fixed on the hand he held, a beautiful hand, white, curiously narrow, with pointed, upturned finger-tips. Once or twice a dull color rose to his sunburned cheek, but in his well-balanced mind was a steady perception of what the filial grief and pain must be from which certain words came. He could not resent them; it was inevitable that a child who had so loved her father should so think and feel. And her self-control, her accurate fluency, answered with him for her sincerity as emotion could not have done. Passion would never carry this noble girl into overstatement. Fairness constrained him to admit, while he listened, that dark color in his cheek, that her view of her father was more likely to be right than her mother's view. An unhappily married woman was seldom fair. Mrs. Upton had never mentioned her husband to him, never alluded to him except in most formal terms; but the facts of her flight from the marital hearth, the fact that he had made her so unhappy, had been to him sufficient evidence of Mr. Upton's general unworthiness. Now, though Imogen's tragic ardor did not communicate any of her faith in her father's wonder or nobility, it did convince him of past unfairness toward, no doubt, a most worthy man. Incompatibility, that had been the trouble; he one of these reformer people, very much in earnest; and Mrs. Upton, dear and lovely though she was, with not a trace of such enthusiasm in her moral make-up.
So, when Imogen had finished, though he sat silent for a little while, though beneath the steady survey of what she put before him was a stirring of trouble, it was in a tone of quiet acceptance that he at last said, looking up at her, "Yes; I quite see what you feel about it. To you, of course, they must look like that, your mother's reasons. They must look very differently to her, that goes without saying. We can't really make out these things, you know, these fundamental antagonisms; I never knew it went as far as that. But I quite see. Poor child. I'm very sorry. It is most awfully hard on you."
"Don't think of me!" Imogen breathed out on a note of pain. "It's not of myself I'm thinking, not of my humiliation and despair—but of him!—of him!—Is itrightthat I should submit?Oughta project like ours to be abandoned for such a reason?"
Again Sir Basil was silent for some moments, considering the narrow white hands. "Perhaps she'll come round,—think better of it."
"Ah!—" it was now on a note of deep, of tremulous hope that she breathed it out, looking into his eyes with the profound, searching look so moving to him; "Ah!—it's there, it's there, that you could help me. She would never yield to me. She might to you."
"Oh, I don't think that likely," Sir Basil protested, the flush darkening.
"Yes, yes," said Imogen, leaning toward him above his clasp of her hand. "Yes, if anything is likely that is so. If hope is anywhere, it's there. Don't you see, in her eyes I stand forhim. To yield to me would be like yielding to him, would be his triumph. That's what she can't forgive in me—that I do stand for him, that I live by all that she rejected. She would never yield to me,—but she might yieldforyou."
"Shall I speak to her about it?" Sir Basil asked abruptly, after another moment in which Imogen's hand grasped his tightly, its soft, warm fingers more potent in appeal than even her eyes had been. And now, again, she leaned toward him, her eyes inundating him with radiant trust and gratitude, her hands drawing his hand to her breast and holding it there, so clasped.
"Will you?—Oh, will you?—dear Sir Basil."
Sir Basil stammered a little. "I'll have a try—It's hard on you, I think. I don't see why you shouldn't have your heart's desire. It's an awfully queer thing to do,—but, for your sake, I'll have a try—put it to her, you know."
"Ah, Iknewthat you were big," said Imogen.
He looked at her, his hand between her hands. The flowering laurel was behind her head. The pine-forest murmured about them. The sky was blue above them, and the deep blue of the distance lay at their feet. Suddenly, as they looked into each other's eyes, it dawned in the consciousness of both that something was happening.
It was to Sir Basil that it was happening. Imogen's was but the consciousness of his experience. Such a thing could hardly happen to Imogen. Neither her senses, nor her emotions, nor her imagination played any dominant part in her nature. She was incapable of falling in love in the helpless, headlong, human fashion that the term implies. But though such feeling lacked, the perception of it in others was swift, and while she leaned to Sir Basil in the sunlight, while she clasped his hand to her breast, while their eyes dwelt deeply on each other, she seemed to hear, like a rising chime of wonder and delight, the ringing of herald bells that sang: "Mine—mine—mine—if I choose to take him."
Wonderful indeed it was to feel this influx of certain power. Sunlight, like that about them, seemed to rise, slowly, softly, within her, like the upwelling of a spring of joy.
It was happening, it had happened to him, his eyes told her that; but whether he knew as she did she doubted and, for the beautiful moment, it added a last touch of charm to her exultation to know that, while she was sure, she could leave that light veil of his wonder shimmering between them.
With the vision of the unveiling her mind leaped to the thought of her mother and of Jack, and with that thought came a swift pulse of vengeful gladness. So she would make answer to them both—the scorner—the rejector. Not for a moment must she listen to the voices of petty doubts and pities. This love, that lay like a bauble in her mother's hand—an unfit ornament for her years—would shine on her own head like a diadem. Unasked, undreamed of, it had turned to her; it was her highest duty to keep and wear it. It was far, far more than her duty to herself; it was her duty to this man, finished, mature, yet full of unawakened possibility; it was her duty to that large, vague world that his life touched, a world where her young faiths and vigors would bring a light such as her mother's gay little taper could never spread. These thoughts, and others, flashed through Imogen's mind, with the swiftness and exactitude of a drowning vision. Yet, after the long moment of vivid realization, it was at its height that a qualm, a sinking overtook her. The gift had come; of that she was sure. But its triumphant displayal might be delayed—nay, might be jeopardized. Some perverse loyalty in his nature, some terrified decisiveness of action on her mother's part, and the golden reality might even be made to crumble. For one moment, as the qualm seized her, she saw herself—and the thought was like a flying flame that scorched her lips as it passed—she saw herself sweeping aside the veil, sinking upon his breast, with tears that would reveal him to himself and her to him.
But it was impossible for Imogen to yield open-eyed to temptation that could not be sanctified. Her strong sense of personal dignity held her from the impulse, and a quick recognition, too, that it might lower her starry altitude in his eyes. She must stand still, stand perfectly still, and he would come to her. She could protect him from her mother's clinging—this she recognized as a strange yet an insistent duty—but between him and her there must not be a shadow, an ambiguity.
The radiance of the renunciation, the resolve, was in her face as she gently released his hand, gently rose, standing smiling, with a strange, rapt smile, above him.
Sir Basil rose, too, silent, and looking hard at her. She guessed at the turmoil, the wonder of his honest soul, his fear lest she did guess it, and, with the fear, the irrepressible hope that, in some sense, it was echoed.
"My dear, dear friend," she said, putting her hand on his shoulder, as though with the gesture she dubbed him her knight, "my more than friend—shall it be elder brother?—I believe that you will be able to help me and my father. And if you fail—my gratitude to you will be none the less great. I can't tell you how I trust you, how I care for you."
From his face she looked up at the sky above them; and in the sunlight her innocent, uplifted smile made her like a heavenly child. "Isn't it wonderful?—beautiful?—" she said, almost conquering her inner fear by the seeming what she wished to be. "Look up, Sir Basil!—Doesn't it seem to heal everything,—to glorify everything,—to promise everything?"
He looked up at the sky, still speechless. Her face, her smile—the sky above it—did it not heal, glorify, promise in its innocence? If a great thing claims one suddenly, must not the lesser things inevitably go?—Could one hold them?—Ought one to try to hold them? There was tumult in poor Sir Basil's soul, the tumult of partings and meetings.
But when everything culminated in the longing to seize this heavenly child—this heavenly woman—to seize and kiss her—a sturdy sense of honesty warned him that not so could he, with honor, go forward. He must see his way more clearly than that. Strange that he had been so blind, till now, of where all ways, since his coming to Vermont, had been leading him. He could see them now, plainly enough.
Taking Imogen's hand once more, he pressed it, dropped it, looked into her eyes and said, as they turned to the descent: "That was swearing eternal friendship, wasn't it!"