A Fountain Sealed Part 21

"In fact he'll carry her off from you some day, soon, eh?" Sir Basil ventured with satisfaction in his own a.s.surance. 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e, "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 a.n.a.lysis 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 pa.s.sing 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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.sured 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.surance; 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."