A Fountain Sealed Part 23

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 c.r.a.pe 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 a.s.senting 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 that _she_ should 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 pa.s.sed 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 where _my_ heart breaks and bleeds for him, where _I_ mourn for him, where _I_--alone, it seems--feel him flouted and betrayed! And she talks of her love for me!"

Jack was wondering that her coherent pa.s.sion 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."