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 spared me?" 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."



XX

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 cooperation. 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. She wants him 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 it right that I should submit? Ought a 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 for him. 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 yield for you."

"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, I knew that 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!"



XXI

Violent emotions, in highly civilized surroundings, may wonderfully be effaced by the common effort of those who have learned how to live. Of these there were, perhaps, not many in our little group; but the guidance of such a past mistress of the art as Imogen's mother steered the social craft, on this occasion, past the reefs and breakers into a tolerably smooth sea.

With an ally as facile, despite his personal perturbations, as Sir Basil, a friend like Mrs. Wake at hand—a friend to whom one had never to make explanations, yet who always understood what was wanted of her,—with a presence so propitious as the calm and unconscious Miss Bocock, the sickening plunges of explanation and recrimination that accompany unwary seafaring and unskilful seamanship were quite avoided in the time that passed between Valerie's appearance at the tea-table—where she dispensed refreshment to Mrs. Wake, Miss Bocock, and Jack only—and the meeting of all the ship's crew at dinner.

Valerie, in that ominous interlude, even when Sir Basil appeared on the veranda, alone, but saying that he had been for a walk with Miss Upton, who was tired and had gone to her room to rest, even when she observed that the Pottses had decided upon maintaining a splendid isolation in their own chambers, did not permit the ship to turn for one moment in such a direction. She had tea sent up to Imogen and tea sent up to the Pottses; but no messages of any sort accompanied either perfectly appointed tray, and when the dinner hour arrived she faced the Pottses' speechless dignity and Imogen's mater dolorosa eyelids with perfect composure. She seemed, on meeting the Pottses, neither to ignore nor to recall.

She seemed to understand speechlessness, yet to take it lightly, as if on their account. She talked at them, through them, with them, really, in such a manner that they were drawn helplessly into her shuttle and woven into the gracefully gliding pattern of social convention in spite of themselves. In fact, she preserved appearances with such success that everyone, to each one's surprise, was able to make an excellent dinner.

After high emotions, as after high seas, the appetite is capricious, shrinking to the shudder of repulsion or rising to whetted keenness. Valerie had the satisfaction of seeing that her crew, as they assured themselves—or, rather, as she assured them—that the waters were silken in their calm, showed the reaction from moral stress in wholesome sensuous gratification. Even Mrs. and Mr. Potts, even Imogen, were hungry.

She herself had still too strongly upon her the qualm of imminent shipwreck to do more than seem to join them; but it was only natural that the captain, who alone was conscious of just how near the reefs were and of just how threatening the horizon loomed, should lack the appetite that his reassuring presence evoked. Jack noticed that she ate nothing, but he alone noticed it.

It was perhaps Jack who noticed most universally at that wonderful little dinner, where the shaded candle-light seemed to isolate them in its soft, diffused circle of radiance and the windows, with their faintly stirring muslin curtains, to open on a warm, mysterious ocean of darkness. The others were too much occupied with their own particular miseries and in their own particular reliefs to notice how the captain fared.

Mrs. Wake must, no doubt, guess that something was up, but she couldn't in the least guess how much. She watched, but her observation, her watchfulness, could be in no sense like his own. Miss Bocock, in a low-cut blouse of guipure and pale-blue satin, her favorite red roses pinned on her shoulder, her fringe freshly and crisply curled above her eyeglasses, was the only quite unconscious presence, and so innocent was her unconsciousness that it could not well be observant. Indeed, in one sinking moment, she leaned forward, with unwonted kindliness, to ask the stony Mrs. Potts if her headache was better, a question received with a sphinx-like bow. Apart, however, from the one or two blunders of unconsciousness, Jack saw that Miss Bocock was very useful to Valerie; more useful than himself, on whom, he felt, her eye did not venture to rest for any length of time. Too tragic a consciousness would rise between them if their glances too deeply intermingled.

Miss Bocock's gaze, behind its crystal medium, was a smooth surface from which the light balls of dialogue rebounded easily. Miss Bocock thought that she had never talked so well upon her own topics as on this occasion, and from the intentness of the glances turned upon her she might well have been misled as to her effectiveness. The company seemed to thirst for every detail as to her theory of the rise of the Mycenean civilization. Mrs. Wake, for all her tact, was too wary, too observant, to fill so perfectly the part of buffer-state as was Miss Bocock.

If one wanted pure amusement, with but the faintest tincture of pity to color it, the countenances of the Pottses were worth close study. That their silence was not for one moment allowed to become awkward, to themselves, or to others, Jack recognized as one of Valerie's miracles that night, and when he considered that the Pottses might not guess to whom they owed their ease, he could hardly pity them. That their eyes should not meet his, except for a heavy stare or two, was natural. After this meeting in the mirage-like oasis that Valerie made bloom for them all, he knew that for the Pottses he would be relegated to the sightless, soundless Saharas of a burning remembrance. It was but a small part of his attention that was spared to the consciousness that Mr. Potts was very uplifted, that Mrs. Potts was very tense, and that Mrs. Potts's dress, as if in protest against any form of relaxation and condonation, was very, very high and tight. Indeed, Mrs. Potts, in her room, before the descent, had said to her husband, in the mutual tones of their great situation, laying aside with resolution the half-high bodice that, till then, had marked her concession to fashionable standards, "Never, never again, in her house. Let her bare her bosom if she will. I shall protest against her by every symbol."

Mr. Potts, with somber justice, as though he exonerated an Agrippina from one of many crimes, had remarked that the bosom, as far as he had observed it, had been slightly veiled; but:—"I understand those tuckers," Mrs. Potts had replied with a withering smile, presenting her back for her husband to hook, a marital office that usually left Mr. Potts in an exhausted condition.

So Mrs. Potts this evening seemed at once to mourn, to protest and to accuse, covered to her chin with a relentless black.

But, though Jack saw all this, he was not in the humor for more than a superficial sense of amusement. With his excited sense of mirth was a deeper sense of disaster, and the poor Pottses were at once too grotesque and too insignificant to satisfy it.

It was upon Imogen and Sir Basil that his eye most frequently turned. Valerie had put them together, separated from herself by the whole length of the table; Mr. Potts was on Imogen's other hand; Miss Bocock sat between Mr. Potts and Valerie, and Jack, Mrs. Wake and Mrs. Potts brought the circle round to Sir Basil, a neat gradation of affinities.

Jack, in a glance, had seen that Imogen had been passionately weeping; he could well imagine that grief. But before her pallid face and sunken eyes he knew that his heart was hardened. Never, judged from a dispassionate standard, had Imogen been so right, and her rightness left him indifferent. If she had been wrong; if she had been, in some sense guilty, if her consciousness had not been so supremely spotless, he would have been sorrier for her. It was the woman beside him whose motives he could not penetrate, whose action to-day had seemed to him mistaken, it was for her that his heart ached. Imogen he seemed to survey from across a far, wide chasm of alienation.

Sir Basil was evidently as bent on helping her as was her mother. He talked very gaily, tossing back all Valerie's balls. He rallied Miss Bocock on her radical tendencies, and engaged in a humorous dispute with Mrs. Wake in defense of racing. Imogen, when he spoke, turned her eyes on him and listened gravely. When her mother spoke, she looked down at her plate. But once or twice Jack caught her eye, while her mother's attention was engaged elsewhere, resting upon her with a curious, a piercing intentness. Such a cold glitter, as of steel, was in the glance, that, instinctively, his own turned on Valerie, as if he had felt her threatened.

This instinct of protection was oddly on the watch to-night. Under the sense of mirth and disaster a deeper thing throbbed in him, some inarticulate sorrow, greater than the apparent causes warranted, that mourned with and for her. In the illumination of this intuition Valerie, he thought, had never been so lovely as to-night. It seemed to him that her body, with its indolence of aspect, expressed an almost superhuman courage. She was soft and fragile and weary, leaning there in her transparent black, her cheek in her hand, her elbow, in, its loose sleeve, resting on the table; but she made him think of a reed: that the tempest could not break.

Her face was pale, he had never seen it so drained of its dusky rose. There was something inexpressibly touching in the flicker of her smile on the white, white cheek, in the innocent gaiety of the dimple placed high and recalling Japanese suggestions, vague as the scent of sandal-wood. She, too, had wept, as he well knew; and his heart ached, dully, as he thought of that bitter weeping, those tears, of humility and pain. Her eyelids, strangely discolored, were like the petals of a melancholy flower, and her eyes were heavy and gentle.

A vague, absurdly alarming sense of presage grew upon him as his eyes went from this face to Imogen's—so still, so cold, so unanswering, lightened, as if from a vail of heavy cloud, by that stealthy, baleful, illuminating glance. In Imogen's whole bearing he read renouncement, but renouncement, in her hand, would assuredly prove a scourge for her mother's shoulders. For the time that they must be together, she and her mother, her sense of her own proved rightness would be relentless, as inflexible as and as relentless as her sense of bitter wrong.

Valerie's shoulders were bared and bowed. She was ready to take it all. But it was here, for Jack, that the deep instinct of protection centered at last in a clear decision; it was here that he felt himself rush in with the only solution, the only salvation. At the thought of it, that one solution, his heart ached more sharply, but it ached for himself alone. For she must go away; yes, that was the only escape; she must go away at once, with Sir Basil. She had failed. She had said it to him that morning in a few broken sentences before relinquishing the hand she grasped.

"I've done more than fail. I've wrecked things"; and she had smiled piteously upon him and left him.

He knew of what she spoke, of the disaster that, as she had seen, finally and irrevocably had overtaken his love for her child.

And it was true, of course. She had failed. She had wrecked things; but in his eyes, the failure she bore, the destruction she brought, made others dark, not her. She must accept the irony of things,—it was not on her that its shadow rested, and she must go, back to her own place, back to her own serene, if saddened, sunlight, where she could breathe again and be safe from scourgings. Thank heaven for Sir Basil, was Jack's thought, over that sharpened ache. And it was with this thought that, for Jack, came the first sinister whisper, the whisper that, as suddenly as the hiss of a viper trodden upon in the grass, warned him of the fulfilment, clear, startling, unimaginable, of all dim presages.

He always remembered, ludicrously, that they had reached the sweet when the whisper came, and with his recollection of its import there mingled for him always the incongruous association of sliced peaches and iced cream. He had just helped himself to this dish when, raising his eyes, he saw Sir Basil looking at Imogen.

It was, apparently, a calm, a thoughtful look, and as Imogen's eyes were downcast to her fruit and cream, which she was eating with much appetite, she did not then meet it. But it was a look a little off guard;—his perception of that was the first low sibilant that reached him;—it was a look full of gentle solicitude, full of brooding, absorbed intentness; and presently, when Imogen, as if aware of it, glanced up and met it, Sir Basil deeply flushed and turned his eyes away.

This passage was a small enough cause to make one suddenly grow very chilly; Jack tried to tell himself that, as he mechanically went on eating. Perhaps Imogen had confided in Sir Basil; perhaps he agreed with her, was sorry, sympathetic, and embarrassed by a sympathy that set him against the woman he loved; perhaps he already felt a protecting, paternal affection for Imogen, just as he himself, in the absurd inversions of their situation, felt a protecting filial affection for Valerie. But at that thought—as if the weak links of his chain of possibilities had snapped and left him at the verge of a chasm, a sudden echo in himself revealed depths of disastrous analogy. It was revelation that came to Jack, rather than self-revelation; the instinct that flamed up in him at this moment was like a torch in a twilit cavern. He might have seen the looming shapes fairly well without it, but, by its illumination, every uncertainty started out into vivid light and dark. The fact that his own feeling was so far other than filial did not detain him. His light was not turned upon himself; of himself he only knew, in that dazzling moment, that he was armed as her knight, armed for her battle as a son could not have been; it was upon Sir Basil, upon Imogen, that the torch-light rested.

He looked presently from them to Valerie. Did she know at all what was her peril? Had she seen at all what threatened her? Her face told him nothing. She was talking to Miss Bocock, and her serenity, as of mellow moonlight, cooled and calmed him a little so that he could wonder whether the peril was very imminent. Even if the unbelievable had happened;—even if Imogen had ensnared Sir Basil—Jack's thoughts, in dealing with poor Imogen, passed in their ruthlessness beyond the facts—even if she had ensnared him, surely, surely, she could not keep him. The glamour would pass from him. He would be the first to fight clear of it were he fully aware of what it signified. For Imogen knew,—the torch-light had revealed that to Jack,—Imogen knew, he and Imogen, alone, knew. Sir Basil didn't and Valerie didn't. Single-handed he might save them both. Save them both from Imogen.

To this strange landing-place had his long voyage, away from old ports, old landmarks, brought him; and on its rocks he stepped to-night, bound on a perilous quest in an unknown country. It seemed almost like the coast of another planet, so desolate, so lonely. But beyond the frowning headlines he imagined that he would find, far inland, quiet green stretches where he would rest, and think of her. The landing was bathed in a light sadder, but sweeter far than the sunlight of other countries. Here he was to fight, not for himself, but for her.

The first move of strategy was made directly after dinner. He asked Imogen to come out and see the moonlight with him.

A word to the wise was a word to Mrs. Wake, who safely cornered Miss Bocock and the Pottses over a game of cards. Jack saw Valerie and Sir Basil established on the veranda, and then led Imogen away, drew her from her quarry, along the winding path in the woods.



XXII

Valerie, on sinking into the low wicker chair, and drawing her chuddah about her shoulders, drawing it closely, although the evening was not cool had expected to find Jack, or Mrs. Wake, or Miss Bocock presently beside her.

She had watched, as they wandered, all of them, into the drawing-room, the hovering, long since familiar to her, of Sir Basil. She had seen that his eye was as much on Imogen as on herself. She had seen Imogen's eye meet his with a deep insistence. What it commanded, this eye, Valerie did not know, but she had grown accustomed to seeing such glances obeyed and she expected to watch, presently, Imogen's and Sir Basil's departure into the moonlit woods.

It was, therefore, with surprise that she looked up to see Sir Basil's form darken against the sky. He asked if he might smoke his cigar beside her, and the intelligent smile he knew so well rested upon him as he took the chair next hers.

In the slight pause that followed, both were thinking that, since their parting in England they had really been very seldom alone together, and in Sir Basil's mind was a wonder, very disquieting, as to what, really, had been the understanding under the parting.

He was well aware that any vagueness as to understanding had been owing entirely to Valerie, well aware that had she not always kept about them the atmosphere of sunny frankness and gay friendship, he would without doubt have entangled himself and her in the complications of an avowed devotion, and that long before her husband's death. For how she had charmed him, this gay, this deep-hearted friend, descending suddenly on his monotonous life with a flutter of wings, a flash of color, a liquid pulse of song, like some strange, bright bird. Charm had grown to affection and to trustful need, and then to the restlessness and pain and sadness of his hidden passion. He would have spoken, he knew it very well, were it not that she had never given him the faintest chance to speak, the faintest excuse for speaking. She had kept him from any avowal so completely that he might well, now, wonder if his self-control had not been owing far more to the intuition of hopelessness than to mere submission. Could she have kept him so silent, had she been the least little bit in love with him? He had, of course, been tremendously in love with her—it was bewildering to use the past tense, indeed—and she, of course, clever creature that she was, must have known it; but hadn't he been very fatuous in imagining that beneath her fond, playful friendship lay the possibility of a deeper response?

Since seeing her again, in her effaced, maternal role, he had realized that she was more middle-aged than he had ever thought her, and since coming to Vermont there had been a new emphasis in this cool, gray quality that removed her the more from associations with youth and passion. So was he brought, by the dizzy turn of events, to hoping that loyalty to his own past love was, for him, the only question, since loyalty to her, in that respect, had never been expected of him.

Yet, as he took his place beside her and looked at her sitting there in the golden light, wrapped round in white, very wan and pale, despite her smile, he felt the strangest, twisted pang of divided desire.

She was wan and she was pale, but she was not cool, she was not gray; he felt in her, as strongly as in far-off days, the warmth and fragrance, and knew that it was Imogen who had so cast her into a shadow. Her image had grown dim on that very first time of seeing Imogen standing as Antigone in the rapt, hushed theater. That dawn had culminated to-day in the over-mastering, all-revealing burst of noon, and from its radiance the past had been hardly visible except as shadow. But now he sat in the moonlight, the past personified in the quiet presence beside him, and the memory of noonday itself became mirage-like and uncertain. He almost felt as if he had been having a wild dream, and that Valerie's glance was the awakening from it.

To think of Imogen's filial grief and of his promise to her,—a promise deeply recalled to him by the message of her tear-worn eyes,—to steady his mind to the task of friendly helpfulness, was to put aside the accompanying memory of eyes, lips, gold hair on a background of flowering laurel, was to re-enter, through sane, kind altruism, his old, normal state of consciousness, and to shut the door on something very sweet and wonderful, to shut the door—in Imogen's phraseology—on his soul, but, in doing that, to be loyal to the older hope.

Perhaps, he reflected, looking at Valerie through the silvery circles of smoke, it depended on her as to whether the door should remain shut on all the high visions of the last weeks. After all, it had always depended on her, tremendously, as to where he should find himself. Certainly he couldn't regard her as the antithesis of soul, though he didn't associate her with its radiant demonstration, yet he felt that, if she so willed it, she could lock the door on visions and keep him sanely, safely, sweetly beside her for the future. If she really did care. Poor Sir Basil, sitting there in his faint cloud of smoke, while clouds of doubt and perplexity—as impalpable drifted through his mind, really couldn't for the life of him have told which solution he most hoped for.

He plunged from the rather humiliating pause of self-contemplation into the more congenial field of action, with a last swift thought—most illuminating of all—as he plunged—that in the results of action he would find his test. If she cared for him—really cared—she would grant his request; and if she cared, why then, not only reawakened loyalty, but some very deep acquiescence in his own nature, would keep him beside her, and to-night would see them as affianced lovers. It would be a pity to have let one's new-found soul go; but, after all, it was so very new that the pang of parting would soon be over; that was a good point about middle-age, one soon got over pangs, soon forgot visions.

"I want to talk to you about something. I'm going to ask you to be kinder to me, even, than you've ever been,"—so he approached the subject, while the mingled peace and bitterness of the last thoughts lingered with him. "I'm going to ask you to let me be very indiscreet, very intimate. It's about something very personal."

Valerie no longer smiled, but she looked even more gentle and even more intelligent. "I will be as kind as you can possibly want me to be," she answered.

"It's about—about Miss Upton."

"About Imogen? Don't you call her Imogen yet? You must."

"I will. I've just begun"; and with this avowal Sir Basil turned away his eyes for a moment, and even in the moonlight showed his flush. "I had a long talk with her this afternoon."

"Yes. I supposed that you had. You may be perfectly frank with me," said Valerie, her eyes on his averted face.

"She was most dreadfully cut up, you know. She came rushing up to the pine woods—I was smoking there—rushing up as if she were running for her life—crying,—exhausted,—in a dreadful state."

"Yes. I know."

"Yes, of course you do. What don't you know and what don't you understand," said Sir Basil gratefully, his eyes coming back to hers. "So I needn't go over it all—what she feels about it. I realize very well that you feel for her as much as I do."

"Oh, yes, you must realize that," said Valerie, a little faintly.

"She was in such a state that one simply had to try to comfort her,—if one could,—and we have come to be such friends;—so she told me everything."

"Yes. Of course."

"Well that's just it. What I want to ask you is—can't you, for her sake, quite apart from your own feelings—give in about it?" So spoke Sir Basil, sitting in the moonlight, the spark of his cigar waning as, in the long pause that followed, he held it, forgotten, in an expectant, arrested hand. Her voice had helped and followed him with such gentleness, such understanding that, though the pause grew, he hardly thought that it needed the added, "I do beg it of you," that he brought out presently to make her acquiescence more sure; and his shock of disappointment was sharpened by surprise to a quick displeasure when, her eyes passing from his face and resting for long on the shadowy woods, she said in a deadened voice, a voice strangely lacking in feeling:—"I can't."

He couldn't conceal the disappointment nor, quite, the displeasure. "You can't? Really you can't?—Forgive me, but don't you think she's a right to have it written, her father's life, you know, if she feels so deeply about it?"

"I can't. I will never give my consent," Valerie repeated.

"But, she's breaking her heart over it," Sir Basil deeply protested; and before the quality of the protestation she paused again, as though to give herself time to hide something.

"I know that it is hard for her," was all she said at last.

Protestation gave way to wonder, deep and sad. "And for her sake—for my sake, let me put it—you can't let bygones be bygones?—You can't give her her heart's desire?—My dear friend, it's such a little thing."

"I know that. But it's for his sake that I can't," said Valerie.

Sir Basil, at this, was silent, for a long time. Perplexity mingled with his displeasure, and the pain of failure, the strangely complex pain.

She did not care for him enough; and she was wrong, and she was fantastic in her wrongness. For his sake?—the dead husband, whom, after all, she had abandoned and made unhappy?—Imogen's words came crowding upon him like a host of warning angel visages. She actually told him that this cruel thwarting of her child was for the sake of the child's father?

It was strange and pitiful that a woman so sweet, so lovely, should so grotesquely deceive herself as to her motives for refusing to see bare justice done.

"May I ask why for him?—I don't understand," he said.

Valerie now turned her eyes once more on his face. With his words, with the tone, courteous yet cold, in which they were spoken, she recognized a reached landmark. For a long time she had caught glimpses of it, ominously glimmering ahead of her, through the sunny mists of hope, across the wide stretches of trust. And here it was at last, but so suddenly, for all her presages, that she almost lost her breath for a moment in looking at it and what it marked. Here, unless she grasped, paths might part. Here, unless she pleaded, something might be slain. Here, above all, something might turn its back on her for ever, unless she were disloyal to her own strange trust.

A good many things had been happening to Valerie of late, but this was really the worst, and as she looked at the landmark it grew to be the headstone of a grave, and she saw that under it might lie her youth.

"I don't believe that you could understand, ever," she said at last in an unaltered voice, a voice, to her own consciousness, like the wrapping of a shroud about her. "It's only I who could feel it, so deeply as to go so far. All that I can say to you is this; my husband was a mediocre man, and a pretentious one. I once loved him. I was always sorry for him. I must guard him now. I cannot have him exposed. I cannot have his mediocrity and pretentiousness displayed to the people there are in the world who would see him as he was, and whose opinion counts."

She knew, as she said it, as she folded the shroud, that he would not be one of those. Her husband's pretentiousness and mediocrity would not be apparent to the ingenuous and uncomplex mind beside her. She knew that mind too well and had watched it, of late, receiving with wondering admiration from her daughter's lips, echoes of her husband's fatuities. She loved him for his incapacity to see sad and ugly and foolish facts as she saw them. She loved his manliness and his childishness. As she had guarded the other, once loved, man from revealment she would have guarded this one from ironic and complex visions. But the lack that endeared him to her might lose him to her. He could never see as she saw and her fidelity to her own light could in his eyes be but perversity. Besides, she could guess at the interpretations that loomed in his mind; could guess at what Imogen had told him; it hardly needed his next words to let her know.

"But was he so mediocre, so pretentious?" he suggested, with the touch of timidity that comes from a deeper hostility than one can openly avow.—"Aren't you a little over-critical—through being disappointed in him—personally? Can you be so sure of your own verdict as all that? Other people, who loved him—who always loved him I mean—are sure the other way round," said Sir Basil.

To prove herself faithful, not perverse, whom must she show to him as unfaithful in very ardor for rightness? In the midst of all the wrenching of her hidden passion came a pang of maternal pity. Imogen's figure, bereaved of her father, of her lover, desolate, amazed, rose before her and, behind it, the hovering, retributory gaze of her husband.

This, then, was what she must pay for having failed, for having wrecked. The money that she handed out must be her love, her deep love, for this lover of her fading years, and she knew that she paid the price, for everything paid the price, above all, for her right to her own complex fidelity, when she said:

"I am quite sure of my own verdict. I take all the responsibility. I think other people wrong. And you must think me wrong, if it looks to you like that."

"But, it's almost impossible for me to think you wrong," said Sir Basil, feeling that a chill far frostier than the seeming situation warranted had crept upon them. "Even if you are—why we all are, of course, most of the time, I suppose. It's only—it's only that I can't see clear. That you should be so sure of an opinion, a mere opinion, when it hurts someone else, so abominably;—it's there I don't seem to see you, you know."

"Can't you trust me?" Valerie asked. It was her last chance, her last throw of the dice. She knew that her heart was suffocating her, with its heavy throbbing, but to Sir Basil's ear her voice was still the deadened, the unchanged voice. "Can't you believe in my sincerity when I give you my reasons? Can't you, knowing me as you do, for so long, believe that I am more likely to be right, in my judgment of my husband, than—other people?"

Her eyes, dark and deep in the moonlight, were steadily upon him. And now, probed to the depths, he, too, was conscious of a parting of the ways It was a choice of loyalties, and he remembered those other eyes, sunlit, limpid, uplifted, that lifted him, too, with their heavenly, upward gaze. He stammered; he grew very red; but he, too, was faithful to his own light.

"Of course I know, my dear friend, that you are sincere. But, as to your being right;—in these things, one can't help seeing crookedly, sometimes, when personal dislike has entered into a,—a near relationship. One really can hardly help it, can one?—" he almost pleaded.

Valerie's eyes rested deeply and darkly upon him and, as they rested, he felt, strangely and irresistibly, that they let him go. Let him go to sink or to soar—that depended on which vision were the truer.

He knew that after his flush he had become very pale. His cigar had gone out;—he looked at it with a nervous gesture. The moonlight was cold and Valerie had turned away her eyes. But as she suddenly rose, he saw, glancing from his dismal survey of the dead cigar, that she was smiling again. It was a smile that healed even while it made things hazy to him. Nothing was hazy to her, he was very sure of that; but she would make everything as easy as possible to him—even the pain of finding her so wrong, even the pain of seeing that she didn't care enough, the complex pain of being set free to seize the new happiness—he was surer of that than ever.

He, too, got up, grateful, troubled, but warm once more.

The moonlight was bright and golden, and the shadows of the vines that stirred against the sky wavered all over her as she stood before him. So strangely did the light and shade move upon her, that it seemed as if she glided through the ripples of some liquid, mysterious element, not air nor light nor water, but a magical mingling of the three. He had just time to feel, vaguely, for everything was blurred, this sense of strangeness and of sweetness, too, when she gave him her hand.

"Friends, as ever, all the same—are we not?" she said.

Sir Basil, knowing that if he glided it was only because she took him with her, grasped it tightly, the warm, tangible comfort. "Well rather!" he said with school-boy emphasis.

Be she as wrong as she would, dear creature of light, of shade, of mystery, it was indeed "well rather." Never had he known how much till now.

Holding the hand, he wondered, gazing at her, how much such a friendship, new yet old, counted for. In revealing it so fully, she had set wide the door, she had set him free to claim his soul; yet so wonderfully did they glide that no gross thought of escape touched him for a moment, so beautifully did she smile that he seemed rather to be gaining something than to be giving something up.



XXIII

Imogen always looked back to her moonlight walk with Jack as one of the few occurrences in her life that, at the time, she had not understood. She understood well enough afterward, with retrospective vexation for her so ludicrous, yet, after all, so natural innocence. At the time she hadn't even seen that Jack had jockeyed her out of a communing with Sir Basil. She had actually thought that Jack might have some word of penitence or exculpation to say to her after his behavior that morning. As a matter of fact she could easily have forgiven him had his lack of sympathy been for her instruments only and not rather for her project. Really, except for the triumph it had seemed to give to her mother, the humiliation that it had seemed, vicariously, to inflict upon herself, she hadn't been able to defend herself from a queer sense of pleasure in witnessing the ejection of the Pottses. With the tension that had come into the scene they had been in the way; she, as keenly as Jack, had felt the sense of unfitness, though she had been willing to endure it, and as keenly as Jack she had felt Mr. Potts as insufferably presuming. She had been glad that his presumption should wreak punishment upon her mother, but glad, too, that when the weapon had served its purpose, it should be removed.

So her feelings toward Jack, as he led her down the woodland path, where, not so many days ago—but how far off they seemed—she had led Sir Basil, were not so bitter as they might have been. Bitterness was in abeyance. She waited to hear what he might have to say for himself and about her—about this new disaster that had befallen her, and with the thought of the retribution that she held, almost, within her grasp, came something of a softening to sadness and regret over Jack. In spite of that glorious moment of the pine woods, with its wide vistas into the future, some torn fiber of her heart would go on aching when she thought of Jack and his lost love; and when he led her away among the woods, thick with trembling lights and shadows, she really, for a little while, expected to hear him say that, sympathize as he might with her mother, reprobate as he might her own attitude toward her, there were needs in him deeper than sympathies or blame; she almost expected him to tell her that, above all, he loved her and couldn't get on without her. Else why had he asked her to come and see the moonlight in the woods?

A vagueness hovered for her over her own attitude in case of such an avowal, a vagueness connected with the veil that still hung between her unavowed lover and herself, and even as she walked away with Jack she felt a mingled pang of eagerness for what he might have to say to her and of anxiety for what, more than his petition on her behalf, Sir Basil might be drawn into saying to her mother on the veranda. She didn't crudely tell herself that she would not quite abandon Jack until the veil were drawn aside and triumph securely attained; she only saw herself, as far as she saw herself at all, as pausing between two choices, pausing to weigh which was the greater of the appealing needs and which the deeper of the proffered loves. She knew that the balance inclined to Sir Basil's side, but she saw herself, for this evening, sadly listening, but withholding, in its full definiteness, the sad rejection of Jack's tardy appeal.

With this background of interpretation it was, therefore, with a growing perplexity that she heard Jack, beside her, or a little before, so that he might hold back the dewy branches from her way, talk on persistently, fluently, cheerfully, in just the same manner, with the same alert voice and pleasant, though watchful, eye, that he had talked at dinner. Her mother might have been walking beside them for all the difference there was. Jack, the shy, the abrupt, the often awkward, seemed infected with her mother's social skill. The moonlit woods were as much a mere background for maneuvers as the candle-lit dinner-table had been. Not a word of the morning's disaster; not a word of sympathy or inquiry; not a word of self-defence or self-exposition; not even a word of expostulation or reproach.

As for entreaty, tenderness, the drawing near once more, the drop to loving need after the climax of alienation, she saw, by degrees, how illusory had been any such imagining; she saw at last, with a sharpness that queerly chilled her blood, that Jack was abdicating the lover's role more decisively than even before. Verbal definiteness left hazes of possibility compared to this dreadfully competent reticence. It was more than evasion, more than reticence, more than abdication that she felt in Jack; it was a deep hostility, it was the steady burning of that flame that she had seen in his eye that morning when she had told her mother that she was cruel and shallow and selfish. This was an enemy who walked beside her and, after perplexity, after the folly of soft imaginings, the folly of having allowed her heart to yearn over him a little, and, perhaps, over herself, indignation rushed upon her, and humiliation, and then the passionate longing for vengeance.

He thought himself very cool and competent, this skilful Jack, leading her down in the illumined, dewy woods, talking on and on, talking—the fool—for so, with a bitter smile, her inner commentary dubbed him—of Manet, of Monet, of Whistler, of the decomposition of light, the vibration of color.

From the heat of fierce anger Imogen reached a contemptuous coolness. She made no attempt to stay his volubility; she answered, quietly, accurately, with chill interest, all he said. They might really have met for the first time at dinner that night, were it not that Jack's competence was a little feverish, were it not that her own courtesy was a little edged. But the swing from tender sadness to perplexity, to fury, to contempt, was so violent that not until they turned to retrace their steps did a very pertinent question begin to make itself felt. It made itself felt with the sudden leap to fear of that underlying anxiety as to what was happening on the veranda, and the fear lit the question with a lurid, though, as yet, not a revealing flicker. For why had he done it? That was what she asked herself as they faced the moonlight and saw the woods all dark on a background of mystic gold. What fatuous complacency had made him take so much trouble just to show her how little he cared for what she might be feeling, for what he had himself once felt?

Imogen pondered, striding before him with her long, light step, urged now by the inner pressure of fear as to the exchange that her absence had made possible between her mother and Sir Basil. It had been foolish of her to leave him for so long, exposed and helpless. Instinctively her step hastened as she went and, Jack following closely, they almost ran at last, silent and breathing quickly. Imogen had, indeed, the uncanny sensation of being pursued, tracked, kept in sight by her follower. From the last thin screen of branches she emerged, finally, into the grassy clearing.

There was a flicker of white on the veranda. In the shadow of the creepers stood two figures, clasping hands. Her mother and Sir Basil.

Fear beat suddenly, suffocatingly, in Imogen's throat. A tide of humiliation, like the towering of a gigantic wave above her head, seemed to rise and encompass her round about. She had counted too soon upon gladness, upon vengeance. Everything was stripped from her, if—if Jack and her mother had succeeded. With lightning-like rapidity her mind grasped its suspicion. She looked back at Jack. His eyes, too, were fixed on the veranda, and suspicion was struck to certainty by what she read in them. He was tense; he was white; he was triumphant. Too soon triumphant! In another moment the imminence of her terror passed by. The clasp was not that of a plighting. It was over; it denoted some lesser compact, one that meant, perhaps, success for her almost forgotten hope. But in Jack's eye she had read what was her danger.

Imogen paused but for a moment to draw the breath of a mingled relief and realization. Her knowledge was the only weapon left in her hand, and strength, safety, the mere semblance of dignity, lay in its concealment. If he guessed that Sir Basil needed guarding, he should never guess that she did. Already her headlong speed might have jeopardized her secret.

"What a pretty setting for our elderly lovers, isn't it?" she said.

That her voice should slightly tremble was only natural; he must know that even from full unconsciousness such a speech must be for her a forced and painful one.

Jack looked her full in the eye, as steadily as she looked at him.

"Isn't it?" he said.



XXIV

She had seen through him and she continued to see through him.

She had little opportunity for more than this passive part on the next day, a day of goings and comings, when the Pottses went, and Rose, Mary, and Eddy, arrived.

He was guarding her mother's lover for her, guarding him from the allurement of her own young loveliness; that was the way Jack saw it. He was very skilful, very competent, she had to own that as she watched him; but he was not quite so omniscient as he imagined himself to be, for he did not know that she saw. That was Imogen's one clue in those two or three days of fear and confusion, days when, actually, Jack did succeed in keeping her and Sir Basil apart. And she must make no endeavor to thwart his watchfulness; she must yield with apparent unconsciousness to his combinations, combinations that always separated her and Sir Basil; she must see him drive off with Sir Basil to meet the new-comers; must see him lead Sir Basil away with himself and Eddy for a masculine smoke and talk; must see him, after dinner, fix them all, irrevocably, at bridge for the rest of the evening,—and not stir a finger;—for he did not know that she saw and he did not know that she, as well as Sir Basil, needed guarding. It was here that Imogen's intuition failed her, and that her blindness made Jack's task the easier.

Imogen, in these days, had little time for self-observation. She seemed living in some dark, fierce region of her nature, unknown to her till now, where she found only fear and fury and the deep determination not to be defeated and bereft. So supremely real were will and instinct, that, seen from their dominion, conscience, reason, all the spiritual tests she had lived by, looked like far, pale clouds floating over some somber, burning landscape, where, among flames and darkness, she was running for her life. Reason, conscience, were still with her, but turned to the task of self-preservation. "He is mine. I know it. I felt it. They shall not take him from me. It is my right, my duty, to keep him, for he is all that I have left in life." The last veil descended upon her soul when, her frosty young nature fired by the fierceness of her resolution, she felt herself to be passionately in love with Sir Basil.

On the third day, the third day of her vita nuova—so she named it—Jack had organized a picnic. They were to drive ten miles to a mountain lake among pine woods, and, thrilling all through with rage, Imogen saw Sir Basil safely maneuvered into the carriage with her mother, Rose, and Eddy, while she was assigned to Jack, Miss Bocock, and Mary.

She heard herself talk sweetly and fluently during the long, sunny, breezy drive, heard Jack answering and assenting with a fluency, a sweetness as apt. Mary was very silent, but Miss Bocock, no doubt, found nothing amiss in the tone of their interchange. Arrived at the beautiful spot fixed on, sunlight drifting over glades of fern, the shadowy woods encircling a lake of blue and silver, she could say, with just the right emphasis of helpless admiration: "Wonderful—wonderful;"—could quote a line of Wordsworth, while her eye passed over the figure of Sir Basil, talking to Rose at a little distance, and over Jack's figure, near at hand.

Jack and Eddy had driven, and the moment came when they were occupied with their horses. She joined the others, and, presently, she was able to draw Sir Basil a little aside, and then still a little further, until, among the rosy aisles, she had him to herself. Stooping to gather a tiny cone she said to him in a low voice:—"Well?—well?—What did she say?"

Sir Basil, too, lowered his voice:—"I've wanted a chance to tell you about it. My dear child, I'm so very sorry, but I've been a failure. She won't hear of it. You'll have to give it up."

"She utterly refused?" How far this matter of her father was from her thoughts—as far as the pale clouds above the fierce, dark landscape.

"Utterly."

"You asked for your sake, as well as for mine?"

"I asked for both our sakes."

"And," still stooping, her face hidden from him, she pierced to find the significance of that moonlight hand-clasp,—"and—she made you agree with her?"

"Agree with, her?—I was most dreadfully disappointed, and I had to tell her so.—How could I agree with her?"

"She might have made you."

"She didn't make me;—didn't try to, I'm bound to say."

"But,"—her voice breathed up to him now with a new gentleness,—a gentleness that, he well might think, covered heart-brokenness,—"but—you haven't quarreled with her,—on my account? I couldn't bear her to lose things, on my account. She thinks of you as a friend—values your friendship;—I know it,—I am sure of it,—even though she would not do this for you. Some hatreds are too deep to yield to any appeal; but it is friendship I know;—and I love her—in spite of everything."

She had murmured on and on, parting the ferns with her delicate hand, finding here and there a little cone, and as Sir Basil looked down at the golden hair, the pure line of the cheek, a great wave of thanksgiving for the surety of his freedom rose in him.

"Dear, sweet child," he said, "this is just what I would expect of you. But don't let that thought trouble you for one moment. I do think her wrong, but we are perhaps better friends than ever. You and I will always care for her"—Sir Basil's voice faltered a little as, to himself, the significance of these last words was borne in upon him, and Imogen, hearing the falter, rose, feeling that she must see as well as hear.

And as she faced him they heard Jack's cheery call:

"Sir Basil—I say, Sir Basil!—You are wanted. You must help with the hampers."

Imogen controlled every least sign of exasperation; it was the easier, since she had gained something from this snatched interview. Her mother had in no way harmed her in Sir Basil's eyes, and this avowal of friendship might include an abdication of nearer claims. And so she walked back beside him—telling him that her cones were for her little cripples. "You are always thinking about some one else's happiness," said Sir Basil—with a tranquillity less feigned than it had been of late. Nothing was lost, nothing really desperate yet. But, during the rest of the afternoon, while they made tea, spread viands, sat about on the moss and rocks laughing, talking, eating, the sense of risk did not leave her. Nothing was lost, yet, but it was just possible that what she had, in her folly, expected to happen the other night to her and Jack, might really happen to Sir Basil and her mother; in the extremity of alienation they might find the depths of need. He thought her wrong, but he also thought her charming.

Sitting a little above them all, on a higher rock, watching them while seeming not to watch, she felt that her sense of peril strangely isolated her from the thoughtless group. She could guess at nothing from her mother's face. She had not spoken with her mother since the day of the disaster—and of the dawn. It was probable that, like her own sad benignity, her mother's placidity was nothing but a veil, but she could not believe that it veiled a sense of peril. Under her white straw hat, with broad black ribbons tying beneath the chin, it was very pale—but that was usual of late—and very worn, too, as it should be; but it was more full of charm than it had any right to be. Her mother—oh! despite pallor and fading—was a woman to be loved; and that she believed herself a woman loved, Imogen, with a deep stirring of indignation and antagonism, suspected. Yes, she counted upon Sir Basil, of that Imogen was sure, but what she couldn't make out was whether her mother guessed that her confidence was threatened. Did she at all see where Sir Basil's heart had turned, as Jack had seen? Was her mother, too, capable of Jack's maneuvers?

From her mother she looked at Sir Basil, looked with eyes marvelously serene. He lounged delightfully. His clothes were delightfully right; they seemed as much a part of his personality as the cones were of the pines, the ferns of the long glades. Rightness—exquisite, unconscious rightness, was what he expressed. Not the rightness of warfare and effort that Imogen believed in and stood for, but a rightness that had come to him as a gift, not as a conquest, just as the cones had come to the pine-trees. The way he tilted his Panama hat over his eyes so that only his chin and crisply twisted mustache were unshadowed, the way in which he held his cigarette in a hand so brown that the gold of the seal ring upon it looked pale, even the way in which he wagged, now and then, his foot in its shapely tan shoe,—were all as delightful as his limpid smile up at her mother, as his voice, deep, decisive, and limpid, too.

Imogen was not aware of these appreciations in herself as she watched him with that serene covertness, not at all aware that her senses were lending her a hand in her struggle for possession and ascendancy, and giving to her hold on the new and threatened belonging a peculiar tenacity. But she did tell herself, again and again, with pride and pain, that this at last was love, a love that justified anything, and that cast all lesser things aside. And, with this thought of rejection, Imogen found her eyes turning to Jack. She looked at Jack as serenely as she had at Sir Basil, and at him she could trust herself to look more fixedly.

Jack's rightnesses were not a bit like those of nature. He was hesitant, unfinished, beside Sir Basil. His voice was meager, his form was meager, his very glance lacked the full, untroubled assurance of the other's. As for his clothes, with a sly little pleasure Imogen noted, point by point, how they just missed easy perfection. Very certainly this man who had failed her was a trophy not comparable to the man who now cared. She told herself that very often, emphasizing the unfavorable contrast. For, strangely enough, it was now, at the full distance of her separation from Jack, an irrevocable separation, that she needed the support of such emphasis. In Jack's absent stare at the lake, his nervous features composed to momentary unconsciousness, she could but feel a quality that, helplessly, she must appreciate. There was in the young man's face a purity, a bravery, a capacity of subtle spiritual choice that made it, essentially, one of the most civilized she had ever known. Sir Basil's brain, if it came to comparison, lacked one or two convolutions that Jack's undoubtedly possessed.

And, appreciating the lost lover, as, through her own sharpness of intelligence she was bound to do, poor Imogen knew again the twisted pang of divided desire. Was it the higher that she had lost, or the higher that she so strangely struggled for? Her eyes, turning again on Sir Basil, stayed themselves on the assurances of his charm, his ease, his rightnesses; but the worst bitterness of all lurked under these consolations; for, though one was lost, the other was not securely gained.

Imogen, that night, made another dash for the open, only, again, to be foiled. Her mother and Miss Bocock were safely on the veranda in the moonlight, the others safely talking in the drawing-room; Sir Basil, only, was not to be seen, and Imogen presently detected the spark of his cigar wandering among the flower-borders. She could venture on boldness, though she skirted about the house to join him. What if Jack did see them together? It was only natural that, if she were unconscious, she should now and then seek out her paternal friend. But hardly had she emerged from the shadow of the house, hardly had Sir Basil become aware of her approach, when, with laughter and chattering outcries the whole intolerable horde was upon her. It was Rose who voiced the associated proposal, a moonlight ramble; it was Rose who seized upon Sir Basil with her hateful air of indifferent yet assured coquetry; but Imogen guessed that she was a tool, even if an ignorant one, in the hands of Jack. Miss Bocock and her mother had not joined them and, in a last desperate hope, Imogen said,—"Mama, too, and Miss Bocock,—we mustn't leave them. Sir Basil, won't you go and fetch them?" And then, Sir Basil detached from Rose, on his way, she murmured,—"I must see that she doesn't forget her shawl," and darted after him. Once more get him to herself and, in the obscurity of the woods, they might elude the others yet. But, as they approached the veranda, she found that Jack was beside them.

Neither Valerie nor Miss Bocock cared to join the expedition; and Valerie, cryptically, for her daughter's understanding, said: "Do you really want more scenery, Sir Basil? You and Imogen had much better keep us company here. We have earned a lazy evening."

"Oh, no, but Rose has claimed Sir Basil as her cavalier," Jack, astonishingly, cut in. "It's all her idea, so that she could have a talk with him. Do you come, too," Jack urged. "It's only a little walk and the moonlight is wonderful among the woods."

Mrs. Upton's eye rested fixedly upon him for a moment. Imogen saw that, but could not know whether her mother shared her own astonishment for Jack's development or whether the look were of the nature of an interchange. She shook her head, however.

"No, thanks, I am too tired. Be sure and show Sir Basil the view from the rustic seat, Imogen. And, oh, Imogen, do you and Sir Basil go to the pantry and ask Selma for some cakes. You will like something to eat."

"I'll come, too," said Jack cheerfully. "I must get my stick."

And thus it was that Sir Basil remained standing beside Mrs. Upton, while the young couple, in absolute silence, accomplished their mission.

Imogen only wondered, as they went, side by side, swiftly, round to the pantry, if Jack did not hear the deep, indignant breaths she vainly tried to master. The rest of the evening repeated the indignities of the afternoon. She was watched, guarded, baffled. Proudly she relinquished every attempt to checkmate; and her mother was not there; for the moment there was no anxiety on that score. But the sense of deep breathing did not leave her. What wouldn't Jack do? She was quite sure that he would lie, if, technically, he had not lied already. The stick had been in the hall near the pantry. If it hadn't;—well, with her consciousness of whistling speed, of a neck-to-neck race, she really would not have had time for a pause of wonder and condemnation.



XXV

She woke next morning to that fierce consciousness of a race. And the goal must now be near, defeat or victory imminent.

It was early and she dressed quickly. She couldn't boldly rap at Sir Basil's door and call him to join her in the garden for a dewy walk before breakfast, for Jack's was the room next his; but, outside, as she drifted back and forth over the lawn, in full view of his window, she sang to herself, so that he could hear, sang sweetly, loudly, sadly, a strain of Wagner. It happened, indeed, to be the Pilgrim's March from Tannhauser that she fixed upon for her aubade. Jack would never suspect such singing, and Sir Basil must surely seize its opportunity. But he did not appear. She surmised that he was not yet up and that it might be wiser to wait for him in the dining-room.

As she crossed the veranda she heard voices around the corner, a snatch of talk from two other early risers sitting outside the drawing-room windows. Mary and Rose; she placed them, as she paused.

"But Jack himself often talks in just that way," Mary was saying, pained it was evident, and puzzled, too, by some imputation, that she hadn't been able to deny.

"Yes, dear old Jack," Rose rejoined; "he does talk in a very tiresome way sometimes; so do you, Mary my darling;—you are all tarred with the same solemn brush; but, you see, it's just that; one may talk like a prig and yet not be one. Jack, behind the big words, means them all, is them all, really. Whereas Imogen;—why she's little—little—little. Even Jack has found that out at last."

"Rose! Rose! Don't—It's not true. I can't believe it! I won't believe it!" broke from Mary. Her chair was pushed back impetuously, and Imogen darted into the dining-room and from there into the hall to find herself, at last, face to face with Sir Basil.

"I hoped I'd find you. I heard you singing in the garden. What is that thing,—Gounod, isn't it? Do let's have a turn in the garden."

But even as he said it, holding her hand, the fatal chink of the approaching breakfast tray told them that the opportunity had come too late. Rose and Mary already were greeting them, Jack and Miss Bocock called morning wishes from above.

Valerie was a late riser; and Imogen, behind the tea-pot and coffee, was always conscious of offering a crisp and charming contrast to lax self-indulgence. But this morning, as they all hemmed her in, fixed her in her rightful place, her cheeks irrepressibly burned with vexation and disappointment. The overheard insolence, too, had been like a sudden slap. She mastered herself sufficiently to kiss Mary's cheek and to take Rose's hand with a gaze of pure unconsciousness, a gaze that should have been as a coal of fire laid upon her venomous head.

But Rose showed no symptom of scorching. She trailed to her place, in a morning-gown all lace and ribbons, smiling nonchalantly at Jack and saucily at Sir Basil, with whom she had established relations of chaffing coquetry; she told Imogen to remember that she liked her coffee half-and-half with a lot of cream and three lumps of sugar. She looked as guiltless as poor Mary looked guilty.

"Eddy's late as usual, I suppose," she said.

"He inherits laziness from mama," Imogen smiled, putting in four lumps, a trivial vengeance she could not resist.

"Some of her charms he has inherited, it's true." Rose, in the absence of her worshiped hostess gave herself extreme license in guileless prods and thrusts. "I only wish he had inherited more. Here you are, Eddy, after all, falsifying my hopes of you. We are talking about your hereditary good points, Eddy;—in what others, except morning laziness, do you resemble your mother?"

"Well, I hate strings of milk in my coffee," said Eddy, bending over his sister to put a perfunctory kiss upon her brow, "and as I observe one in that cup I hope it's not intended for me. Imogen, why won't you use the strainer?"

With admirable patience, as if humoring two spoiled children, Imogen filled another cup with greater care.

"Mama feels just as I do about strings in coffee," said Eddy, bearing away his cup. "We are both of us very highly organized."

"You mustn't be over-sensitive, you know," said Imogen, "else you will unfit yourself for life. There are so many strings in one's coffee in life."

"The fit avoid them," said Eddy, "as I do."

"You inherit that, too, from mama," said Imogen, "the avoidance of difficulties. Do try some of our pop-overs, Miss Bocock; it's a national dish."

"What are you going to do this morning, Imogen?" Jack asked, and she felt that his eye braved hers. "It's your Girls' Club morning, isn't it? That will do beautifully for you, Miss Bocock. I've been telling Miss Bocock about it; she is very much interested."

"Very much indeed. I am on the committee of such a club in England," said Miss Bocock; "I should like to go over it with you."

Imogen smiled assent, while inwardly she muttered "Snake!" Her morning, already, was done for, unless, indeed, she could annex Sir Basil as a third to the party and, with him, evade Miss Bocock for a few brief moments. But brief moments could do nothing for them. They needed long sunny or moonlit solitudes.

"We must be alone together, under the stars, for our souls to see," Imogen said to herself, while she poured the coffee, while she met Jack's eye, while, beneath this highest thought, the lesser comment of "Snake!" made itself heard.

"What's become of that interesting girl who had the rival club, Imogen?" Rose asked. "The one you squashed."