A Fountain Sealed Part 40

From Miss Boc.o.c.k there was neither smile, nor sting, nor silence to endure.

Miss Boc.o.c.k had suspected nothing, either on the mother's side or on the daughter's, and took the announcement very placidly. "Indeed. Really. How very nice. Accept my congratulations," were her comments. Imogen at once asked her to spend a week-end at Thremdon Hall next Spring, and Miss Boc.o.c.k in the same way said: "Thanks. That will be very nice. I've never stayed there." There was still a subtle irritation in the fact that while Miss Boc.o.c.k now accepted her, in the order of things, as one of the "county people," as the gracious mistress of Thremdon Hall, as very much above a country doctor's family, she didn't seem to regard her with any more interest or respect as an individual.

These, after all, were the superficialities of the situation; its deeper aspects were, Imogen felt, as yet unfaced. Her mother seemed quite content to let Imogen's silence stand for apology and retractation, quite willing to go on, for the little further that they had to go together, in an ambiguous relation. This was, indeed, Imogen felt, her mother's strength; she could, apparently, put up with any amount of ambiguity and probably looked upon it as an essential part of life. Perhaps, and here Imogen was conscious of a twinge of anxiety, she put up with it so quietly because she didn't recognize it in herself, in her own motives and actions; and this thought teased at Imogen until she determined that she must stand forth in the light and show her mother that she, too, was self-a.s.sured and she, too, magnanimous.

She armed herself for the task by a little talk with Sir Basil, the nearest approach they ever allowed themselves to the delicate complexities in which they had come to recognize each other and out of which, to a certain extent, they had had to fight their way to the present harmony. She was with him, again, among the laurels, a favorite place with them, and Imogen sat on her former ledge of sunny rock and Sir Basil was extended beside her on the moss. She had been reading Emerson to him, and when the essay was finished and she had talked to him a little about the "over-soul,"--dear Basil's recollections of metaphysics were very confused,--she presently said to him, letting her hand slide into his while she spoke:--"Basil, dearest,--I want to ask you something, and you must answer very truly, for you need never fear that I would flinch from any truth. Tell me,--did you ever,--ever care for mama?"

Sir Basil, his hat tilted over his eyes, grew very red and looked down at the moss for some moments without replying.

"Of course I know that, in some sense, you did care," said Imogen, a faint tremble in her voice, a tremble that, in its sweet acquiescence to something that was hurting her, touched him infinitely. "I know, too, that there are loves and loves. I know that anything you may have felt for mama is as different from what you feel for me as lamplight is from daylight. I won't speak of it, ever, again, dear Basil; but for this once let me see clearly what was in your past."

"I did care for her," Sir Basil jerked out at that;--"quite tremendously, until I saw you. She will always be a dear friend, one of the dearest, most charming people I've ever known. And, no, it wasn't like lamplight, you know";--something in that a.n.a.logy was so hurting Sir Basil that it made him, for a moment, forget his darling's hurt;--"that wasn't it. Though, it's quite true, you're like daylight."

"And--and--she?"--Imogen accepted the restatement, though her voice trembled a little more.

He now looked up at her, a clear, blue ray from his honest eyes. "Well, there, you know, it _has_ been a relief. I could never tell, in the past; she showed me nothing, except that friends.h.i.+p; but since she has been free, since I've seen her over here, she has shown me quite clearly, that it was, on her side, only that."

Imogen was silent for a long time. She didn't "know" at all. And there was a great deal to accept; more, oddly enough, than she had ever faced. She had always believed that it had been like lamplight to daylight. But, whatever it had been, the day had conquered it. And how dear, how n.o.ble of her lover to show, so unfalteringly, his loyalty to the past. It was with a sigh made up of many satisfactions that she said at last:--"Dear mama;--I am so glad that I took nothing she cared for from her."

It was on that afternoon that she found her time for "standing forth in the light" before her mother.

She didn't want it to be indoors; she felt, vaguely, that four walls would make them too intimate, as it were; shut them into their mutual consciousness too closely. So that when she saw her mother, after tea, watering and gathering her flowers at the edge of the wood, she went out to her, across the gra.s.s, sweet and mild in the long white dress that she had worn since joy had come to her.

She wished to be very direct, very simple, very sweet.

"Mama, darling," she said, standing there beside her while Valerie, after a quiet glance up at her, continued to cut her roses;--"I want to say something to you. This seems such a beautiful time to say deep, grave things in, doesn't it, this late afternoon hour? I've wanted to say it since the other night when, through poor Jack's folly of revenge and blindness, we were all put into such an ugly muddle, at such ugly cross-purposes." She paused here and Valerie, giving neither a.s.sent nor negation, said: "Yes, Imogen?"

"I want to say to you that I am sorry, mama dear";--Imogen spoke gravely and with emphasis;--"sorry, in the first place, that I should so have misjudged you as to imagine that--at your time of life and after your sobering experience of life--you were involved in a love affair. I see, now, what a wrong that was to do to you--to your dignity, your sense of right and fitness. And I'm sorrier that I should have thought you capable of seconding Jack's attempts to keep from me a love that had drawn to me as a magnet to the north. The first mistake led to the second. I had heard your friends conjecturing as to your feeling for Basil, and the pain of suspecting that of you--my father's new-made widow--led me astray. I think that in any great new experience one's whole nature is perhaps a little off-balance, confused. I had suffered so much, in so many ways;--_his_ death;--Jack's unworthiness;--this fear for you;--and then, in these last days, for what you know, mama, for _him_, because of _him_--my father, a suffering that no joy will ever efface, that I was made, I think, for a little time, a stranger to myself. And then came love--wonderful love--and it shook my nature to its depths. I was dazzled, torn, tempest-tossed;--I did not see clearly. Let that be my excuse."

Valerie still stopped over her roses, her fingers delicately, accurately busy, and her face, under the broad brim of her hat, hidden.

Again Imogen paused, the rhythm of her words, like an echo of his voice in her own, bringing a sudden sharp, sweet, reminiscence of her father, so that the tears had risen to her eyes in hearing herself. And again, for all reply, her mother once more said only: "Yes, Imogen."

It was not the reply she had expected, not the reply that she had a right to expect, and, even out there, with the flowers, so impersonally lovely, about them, the late radiance softly bathing them, as if in rays of forgiveness and mild pity, even with the tears, evidences of sorrow and magnanimity, in her eyes, Imogen felt a little at a loss, a little confused.

"That is, all, mama," she said;--"just that I am sorry, and that I want you to feel, in spite of all the sad, the tragic things that there have been between us, that my deep love for you is there, and that you must trust it always."

And now there was another silence. Valerie stooping to her flowers, mysterious, ambiguous indeed, in her shadow, her silence.

Imogen, for all the glory of her mood, felt a thrill of anger, and the reminiscence that came to her now was of her father's pain, his familiar pain, for such shadows, such silences, such blights cast upon his highest impulses. "I hope, mama, that you will always trust my love," she said, mastering the rising of her resentment.

And once more came the monotonous answer, but given this time with a new note:--"Yes, Imogen," her mother replied, "you may always trust my love."

She rose at that, and her eyes pa.s.sed swiftly across her daughter's face, swiftly and calmly. She was a little flushed, but that might have been from the long bending over the flowers, and if it was a juggling dexterity that she used, she had used it indeed so dexterously that it seemed impossible to say anything more. Imogen could find no words in which to set the turned tables straight.

She had imagined their little scene ending very beautifully in a grave embrace and kiss; but no opportunity was given her for this final demonstration of her spirit of charity. Her mother gathered up her scissors, her watering-pot, her trowel, and handing Imogen the filled basket of roses said, "Will you carry these for me, my dear?"

The tone of quiet, everyday kindness dispelled all glory, and set a lower standard. Here, at this place, very much on the earth, Imogen would always find her, it seemed to say. It said nothing else.

Yet Imogen knew, as she walked back beside her mother, knew quite as well as if her mother had spoken the words, that her proffered love had not been trusted, that she had been penetrated, judged, and, in some irresistible way, a way that brought no punishment and no reproof, nor even any lessening of affection, condemned. Her mother still loved her, that was the helpless conviction that settled upon her; but it was as a child, not as a personality, that she was loved,--very much as Miss Boc.o.c.k respected her as the mistress of Thremdon Hall and not at all on her own account; but her mother, too, for all her quiet, and all her kindness, thought her "self-centered, self-righteous, cold-hearted," and--Imogen, in a sharp pang of insight, saw it all--because of that would not attempt any soul-stirring appeal or arraignment. She knew too well with what arms of spiritual a.s.surance she would be met.

It was in silence, while they walked side by side, the basket of roses between them, that Imogen fiercely seized these arms, fiercely parried the unuttered arraignment, and, more fiercely, the unuttered love.

She could claim no verbal victory, she had had to endure no verbal defeat; it was she herself who had forced this issue upon a situation that her mother would have been content to leave undefined. Her mother would never fix blame; her mother would never humiliate; but, she had found it to her own cost,--though the cost was as light as her mother could make it--she would not consent to be placed where Imogen had wished to place her. Let it be so, then, let it end on this note of seeming harmony and of silent discord; it was her mother's act, not her own. Truth was in her and had made once more its appeal; once more deep had called to deep only to find shallowness. For spiritual shallowness there must be where an appeal such as hers could be so misunderstood and so rejected.

She was angry, sore, vindictive, though her sharp insight did not reach so far as to tell her this; it did, however, tell her that she was wounded to the quick. But the final refuge was in the thought that she was soon to leave such judgments and such loves behind her for ever.

x.x.x

It was on a late October day that Jack Pennington rode over the hills to Valerie's summer home.

Two months were gone since Imogen's reporter-haunted nuptials had been celebrated in the bland little country church that raised its white steeple from the woodlands. Jack had been present at them; decency had made that necessary, and a certain grimness in his aspect was easily to be interpreted in a dismal, defeated rival. It was as such, he knew, that he was seen there.

It had been a funny wedding,--to apply none of the other terms that lay deeper in him. In watching it from the white-wreathed chancel he had thought of Valerie's summing-up: "Imogen is one of the people who make the world go round." The world in every phase had been there, from the British amba.s.sador and the Langleys to the East Side club girls--brought up from New York in the special train--and a flouris.h.i.+ng consignment of cripples and nurses. Here and there in her path Imogen might meet the blankness of a Miss Boc.o.c.k, the irony of a Mrs. Wake, a disillusion like Mary's, an insight like his own; but the great world, in its aspect of power and simplicity, would be with her always. He had realized as never before Imogen's capacity, when he saw the cohorts of her friends and followers overflow the church.

She had been a fitting center to it all; though the center, for Jack, was Valerie, exquisite, mildly radiant, not a hint on her of dispossession or of doom; but Imogen, white and rapt and grave, had looked almost as wonderful as on the day when she had first dawned upon Sir Basil's vision.

Jack, watching her uplifted profile as she stood at the altar-rail, found himself trivially, spitefully, irrelevantly murmuring:--"Her nose _is_ too small." And yet she looked more than ever like a Botticelli Madonna.

Rose and Eddy were to be married that winter in New York, a gigantic opportunity for the newspapers, for already half the world seemed trooping to the festivities. Afterward, with old-fas.h.i.+oned Americanism, they would live in quite a little house and try to forget about Rose's fortune until Eddy made his.

Valerie was to have none of the bother of this wedding. Mrs. Packer, a mournful, jeweled, faded little beauty, was well fitted to cope with such emergencies. Her secretaries sat already with pens poised.

Imogen's wedding had kept her mother working like a galley-slave, so Rose told Jack, with the familiarity that was now justifiable in one who was almost of the family, and that Eddy had told her, with much disgust of demeanor, that its financing had eaten pretty deeply into his mother's shrunken means. Rose made no open denunciation; she, no more than anyone else, could guess from Jack's silence what his feeling about Imogen might really be. But she was sure that he was well _over_ her, and that, above all, he was one of the elect who _saw_ Mrs. Upton; she could allow herself a musing survey of all that the mother had done for the daughter, adding, and it was really with a wish for strict justice: "Of course Imogen never had any idea of money, and she'll never realize what she cost." In another and a deeper sense it might be that that was the kindest as well as the truest thing to say of Imogen.

Since the wedding he knew that Valerie had been quietly at the little house among the hills, alone for the most part, though Mrs. Wake was often with her and the Pakenhams had paid her a visit on their way back to England.

Now Mrs. Wake was gone back to New York, and her own departure was to take place in a few days. Jack, spending a week-end with friends not beyond riding distance, felt that he must see her again in the surroundings where he had come to know her so well and to know himself as so changed.

He rode over the crests of hills in the flaming, aromatic woods. The fallen leaves paved his way with gold. In the deep distances, before him a still, blue haze, like the bloom on ripe grape-cl.u.s.ters, lay over the purples of the lower ranges. Above, about, before him was the blue sky of the wonderful American "fall," high, clear, crystalline. The air was like an elixir. Jack's eyes were for all this beauty,--"the vast, unconscious scenery of my land," the line that drifted in his thoughts,--his own consciousness, taken up into his contemplation, seeming as vast and as unperplexed. But under his calm, his happy sadness, that, too, seemed a part of the day, ran, like the inner echo to the air's intoxication, a stream of deep, still excitement.

He did not think directly of Valerie, but vague pictures pa.s.sed, phantom-like, before his mind. He saw her in her garden, gathering late flowers; he saw her reading under the fringe of vine-leaves and tendrils; he saw her again in the wintry New York of snow, sunlight, white, gold and blue, or smiling down from the high-decked steamer against a sky of frosty rose; he saw her on all possible and adequate backgrounds of the land he so loved. But,--oh, it was here that the under-current, the stream of excitement seemed to rise, foaming, circling, submerging him, choking him, with tides of grief and desolation,--seeing her, too, in that land she loved;--not in the Surrey garden, no, no,--that was shut to her for ever;--but in some other, some distant garden, high-walled, the pale gold and gray of an autumnal sunset over its purpling bricks, or on a flower-dappled common in spring, or in spring woods filled with wild hyacinths and primroses. How he could see her, place her, over there, far, far away, from his country--and from him.

It was, after the last sharp trot, the last leisurely uphill canter, on the bordering, leaf-strewn gra.s.s of the winding road, where the white walls and gray roof of the little house showed among the trees, that all the undercurrent seemed to center in a knot of suffocating expectancy and pain.

And Valerie, while Jack so rode, so approached her, was fulfilling one of his visions. She had spent the afternoon in her garden, digging, planting, "messing" as she expressed it, very happily among her borders, where late flowers, purple and white and gold, still bloomed. She was planning all sorts of things for her garden, a row of double-cherry-trees to stand at the edges of the woods and be symbols of paradise in spring, with their deep upon deep of miraculous white. Little almond-trees, too, frail sprays of pink on a spring sky, and quince-trees that would show in autumn among ample foliage the pale gold of their softly-furred fruit. She wanted spring flowers to run back far into the woods, the climbing roses and honeysuckle to make summer delicious among the vines of the veranda. The afternoon, full of such projects, pa.s.sed pleasantly, and when she came in and dressed for her solitary tea, she felt pleasantly tired. She walked up and down the drawing-room, its white walls warm with the reflections of outer sunlight, listening vaguely to the long trail of her black tea-gown behind her, looking vaguely from the open windows at the purple distances set in their nearer waves of flame.

At the end of the room, before the austere little mantelpiece, she paused presently to look at herself in the austere little mirror with its compartments of old gilt; at herself, the illuminated white of the room behind her reflection. A narrow crystal vase mirrored itself beside her leaning arm, and its one tall rose, set among green leaves and russet stems and thorns, spread depths of color near her cheek. Valerie's eyes went from her face to the rose. The rose was fresh, glowing, perfect. Her face, lovely still, was faded.

She stood there, leaning beside the flower, the fingers of her supporting hand sunken deep in the chestnut ma.s.ses of her hair, and noted, gravely, earnestly, the delicate signs and seals of stealing age.

Never, never again would her face be like the rose, young, fresh, perfect.

And she herself was no longer young; in her heart she knew the stillness, the droop, the peace--almost the peace--of softly-falling petals.

How young she had been, how lovely, how full of sweetness. That was the thought that pierced her suddenly, the thought of wasted sweetness, unrecorded beauty, unnoted, unloved, all to go, to pa.s.s away for ever. It seemed hardly for herself she grieved, but for the doom of all youth and loveliness; for the fleeting, the impermanence of all life. The vision of herself pa.s.sed to a vision of the other roses, the drooping, the doomed, scattering their petals in the chill breeze of coming winter.

"Poor things," was her thought,--her own self-pity had part only in its inclusiveness,--"summer is over for all of us."