Chapter 18

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 rôle, 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."