Chapter 2

Yes, there it was; she could find very little of self-reproach within her in regard to her husband; but in regard to Imogen her conscience was not easy, and as her thoughts passed to her, her face grew still sadder and still graver. She saw Imogen, in the long retrospect,--it was always Imogen, Eddy had never counted as a problem--first as a child whom she could take abroad with her for French, German, Italian educational experiences; then as a young girl, very determined to form her own character, and sure, with her father to second her assurance, that boarding-school was the proper place to form it. Eddy was also at school, and Mrs. Upton, with the alternative of flight or an unbroken tête-à-tête with her husband before her, chose the former. There was no breach, no crash; any such disturbances had taken place long before; she simply slid away, and her prolonged absences seemed symbols of fundamental and long recognized divisions. She came home for the children's holidays; built, indeed, the little house among the Vermont hills, so that she might, as it were, be her husband's hostess there. She hoped, through the ambiguous years, for Imogen's young-womanhood; looking forward to taking her place beside her when the time came for her first steps in the world. But here, again, Imogen's clear-cut choice interfered. Imogen considered girlish frivolities a foolish waste of time; she would take her place in the world when she was fully equipped for the encounter; she was not yet equipped to her liking and she declared herself resolved on a college course.

Imogen had been out of college for three years now, but the routine of Mrs. Upton's life was unchanged. The rut had been made too deep for her to climb out of it. It had become impossible to think of reentering her husband's home as a permanent part of it. Eddy was constantly with her in England in the intervals of his undergraduate life; but how urge upon Imogen more frequent meetings when her absence would leave the father desolate? The summers had come to be their only times of reunion and Mrs. Upton had more and more come to look forward to them with an inward tremor of uncertainty and discomfort. For, under everything, above everything, was the fact, and she felt herself now to be looking it hard in the face, that Imogen had always, obviously, emphatically, been fondest of her father. It had been from the child's earliest days, this more than fondness, this placid partizanship. In looking back it seemed to her that Imogen had always disapproved of her, had always shown her disapproval, gently, even tenderly, but with a sad firmness. Her liberation from her husband's standard was all very well; she cared nothing for Imogen's standard either, in so far as it was an echo, a reflection; only, for her daughter not to care for her, to disapprove of her, to be willing that she should go out of her life,--there was the rub; and the fact that she should be considering it over a tea-table in Surrey while Imogen was battling with all the somber accompaniments of grief in New York, challenged her not to deny some essential defect in her own maternity. She was an honest woman, and after her hour of thought she could not deny it, though she could not see clearly where it lay; but the recognition was but a step to the owning that she must try to right herself. And at this point,--she had drawn a deep breath over it, straightening herself in her chair,--her friends came in from their drive and put an end to her solitude.

For the first years of her semi-detached life Mrs. Upton had been as gay as a very decorous young grass-widow can be. Her whole existence, until her marriage, which had dropped, or lifted, her to graver levels, had been passed among elaborate social conditions, and wherever she might go she found the protection of a recognized background. She had multitudes of acquaintances and these surrounding nebulæ condensed, here and there, into the fixed stars of friendship. Not that such condensations were swift or frequent. Mrs. Upton was not easily intimate. Her very graces, her very kindnesses, her sympathy and sweetness, were, in a manner, outposts about an inner citadel and one might for years remain, hospitably entertained, yet kept at a distance. But the stars, when they did form, were very fixed. Of such were the two friends who now came in eager for tea, after their nipping drive: Mrs. Pakenham, English, mother of a large family, wife of a hard-worked M.P. and landowner; energetically interested in hunting, philanthropy, books and people; slender and vigorous, with a delicate, emaciated face, weather-beaten to a pale, crisp red, her eyes as blue as porcelain, her hair still gold, her smile of the kindest, and Mrs. Wake, American, rosy, rather stout, rather shabby, and extremely placid of mien. Mrs. Pakenham, after her drive, was beautifully tidy, furred as to shoulders and netted as to hair; Mrs. Wake was much disarranged and came in, smiling patiently, while she put back the disheveled locks from her brow. She was childless, a widow, very poor; eking out her insufficient income by novel-writing; unpopular novels that dealt, usually, with gloomy themes of monotonous and disappointed lives. She was, herself, anything but gloomy.

She gave her friend, now, swift, short glances, while, standing before her, her back to the fire, she put her hair behind her ears. She had known Valerie Upton from childhood, when they had both been the indulged daughters of wealthy homes, and through all the catastrophes and achievements of their lives they had kept in close touch with each other. Mrs. Wake's glances, now, were fond, but slightly quizzical, perhaps slightly critical. They took in her friend, her attitude, her beautifully "done" hair, her fresh, sweet face, so little faded, even her polished finger-nails, and they took in, very unobtrusively, the American letter on her lap. It was Mrs. Pakenham who spoke of the letter.

"You have heard, then, dear?"

"Yes, from Imogen."

Both had seen her stunned, undemonstrative pain in the first days of the bereavement; the cables had supplied all essential information. Her quiet, now, seemed to intimate that the letter contained no harrowing details.

"The poor child is well, I hope?"

"Yes, I think so; she doesn't speak much of herself; she is very brave."

Mrs. Pakenham, a friend of more recent date, had not known Mr. Upton, nor had she ever met Imogen.

"Eddy was with her, of course," said Mrs. Wake.

"Yes, and this young Mr. Pennington, who seems to have become a great friend. May Smith and Julia Halliwell, of course, must have helped her through it all. She says that people are very kind." Mrs. Upton spoke quietly. She did not offer to show the letter.

"Jack Pennington. Imogen met him when she went last year to Boston. You remember old Miss Pennington, his great-aunt, Valerie."

"Very well. But this Jack I've never met."

"He is, I hear, devoted to Imogen."

"So I infer."

"And the very nicest kind of young man, though over-serious."

"I inferred that, too."

"And now," said Mrs. Wake, "Eddy will be here on Saturday; but what of Imogen?"

"Imogen says that she will come over at once, if I want her."

"Far the best plan. She will live with you here--until she marries Mr. Pennington, or some other devotee," said Mrs. Pakenham comfortably.

Mrs. Upton looked up at her. "No, I shall go to her, until she marries Mr. Pennington or some other devotee."

There was after this a slight pause, and it was Mrs. Pakenham who broke it with undiminished cheerfulness. "Perhaps, on the whole, that will be best, for the present. Of course it's a pity to have to shut up your home, just as you are so nicely installed for the winter. But, you mustn't let her delay, my dear, in getting married. You can't wait over there indefinitely, you know."

"Ah, it's just that that I must do," said Mrs. Upton.

There was, again, silence at this, perhaps over a further sense of fitness, but in it Mrs. Pakenham's eyes met Mrs. Wake's in a long interchange. Mrs. Upton, in the event of Imogen "delaying," would not stay; that was what, plainly, it intimated.

"Of course," said Mrs. Pakenham, after some moments of this silent acquiescence and silent skepticism, "that will make it very evident why you didn't stay before."

"Not necessarily. Imogen has no one with her now; my preferences as to a home would naturally go down before such an obvious duty."

"So that you will simply take up all the threads, yours and hers?"

"I shall try to."

"You think she'll like that?" Mrs. Pakenham inquired.

"Like what?" Mrs. Upton rather quickly asked.

"That you should take up her threads. Isn't she very self-reliant? Hasn't her life, the odd situation, made her so?"

At this Mrs. Upton, her eyes on the fire, blushed; faintly, yet the deepening of color was evident, and Mrs. Pakenham, leaning impulsively forward, put her hand on hers, saying, "Dear Valerie, I don't mean that you're responsible!"

"But I am responsible." Mrs. Upton did not look at her friend, though her hand closed gently on hers.

"For nothing with which you can reproach yourself, which you can even regret, then. It's well, altogether well, that a girl should be self-reliant and have her own threads."

"Not well, though," said Mrs. Wake, folding the much-entangled veil she had removed, "that a daughter should get on so perfectly without her mother."

"Really, I don't know about that"--Mrs. Pakenham was eager in generous theories--"not well for us poor mothers, perhaps, who find it difficult to believe that we are such background creatures."

"Not well for the daughter," Mrs. Wake rejoined. "In this case I think that Imogen has been more harmed than Valerie."

"Harmed!" Mrs. Pakenham exclaimed, while Valerie Upton's eyes remained fixed on the fire. "How can she have been harmed? From all I hear of her she is the pink of perfection."

"She is a good girl."

"You mean that she's suffered?"

"No, I don't think that she has suffered."

Mrs. Wake was evidently determined to remain enigmatical; but Valerie Upton quietly drew aside her reserves. "That is the trouble, you think; she hasn't."

"That is a symptom of the trouble. She doesn't suffer; she judges. It's very harmful for a young girl to sit in judgment."

"But Valerie has seen her so much!" Mrs. Pakenham cried, a little shocked at the other's ruthlessness. "Three months of every year--almost."

"Three months when they played hostess to each other. It was really Valerie who was the guest in the house when Imogen and her father were there. The relation was never normal. Now that poor Everard is gone, the necessary artificiality can cease. Valerie can try her hand at being a mother, not a guest. It will do both her and Imogen good."

"That's just the conclusion I had come to. That's just how I had been seeing it." The fresh tea-pot was brought in at this juncture, and, as she spoke, Valerie roused herself to measure in the tea and pour on the boiling water. She showed them, thus, more fully, the grace, the freshness, the look of latent buoyancy that made her so young, that made her, even now, in her black dress and with her gravity, remind one of a flower, submerged, momentarily, in deep water, its color hardly blurred, its petals delicately crisp, its fragrance only needing air and sunlight to diffuse itself. For all the youthfulness, a quality of indolent magic was about her, a soft haze, as it were, woven of matured experience, of detachment from youth's self-absorption, of the observer's kindly, yet ironic, insight. Her figure was supple; her nut-brown hair, splendidly folded at the back of her head, was hardly touched with white; her quickly glancing, deliberately pausing, eyes were as clear, as pensive, as a child's; with almost a child's candor of surprise in the upturning of their lashes. A brunette duskiness in the rose of lips and cheeks, in the black brows, in the fruit-like softness of outline, was like a veil drawn across and dimming the fairness that paled to a pearly white at throat and temples. Her upper lip was ever so faintly shadowed with a brunette penciling of down, and three _grains de beauté_, like tiny patches of velvet, seemed applied with a pretty coquetry, one on her lip and two high on her cheek, where they emphasized and lent a touch of the Japanese to her smile. Even her physical aspect carried out the analogy of something vivid and veiled. She was clear as day, yet melting, merged, elusive, like the night; and in her glance, in her voice, was that mingled brightness and shadow. When she had given them their tea she left her friends, taking her toasted little dog, languid and yawning, under her arm, and, at a sharp yelp from this petted individual, his paw struck by the opening of the door, they heard her exclaiming in contrition over him, "Darling lamb! did his wicked mother hurt him!"

Mrs. Pakenham and Mrs. Wake sipped their tea for some time in silence, and it was Mrs. Pakenham who voiced at last the thought uppermost for both of them, "I wonder how Sir Basil will take it."

"Everard's death, you mean, or her going off?"

"Both."

"It's obvious, I think, that if he doesn't follow her at once it will only be because he thinks that now his chance has come he will make it surer by waiting."

"It's rather odious of me to think about it at all, I suppose," Mrs. Pakenham mused, "but one can't help it, having seen it all; having seen more than either of them have, I'm quite sure, poor, lovely dears."

"No, one certainly can't help it," Mrs. Wake acquiesced. "Though I, perhaps, should have been too prudish to own to it just now--with poor Everard hardly in his grave. But that's the comfort of being with a frank, unscrupulous person like you; one gets it all out and need take no responsibility."

Mrs. Pakenham smiled over her friend's self-exposure and helped her to greater comfort with a still more crude, "It will be perfect, you know, if he does succeed. I suppose there's no doubt that he will."

"I don't know; I really don't know," Mrs. Wake mused.

"One knows well enough that she's tremendously fond of him,--it's just that that she has taken her stand on so beautifully, so gracefully."

"Yes, so beautifully and so gracefully that while one does know that, one can't know more--he least of all. He, I'm pretty sure, knows not a scrap more,"

"But, after all, now that she's free, that is enough."

"Yes--except--".

"Really, my dear, I see no exception. He is a delightful creature, as sound, as strong, as true; and if he isn't very clever, Valerie is far too clever herself to mind that, far too clever not to care for how much more than clever he is."

"Oh, it's not that she doesn't care--"

"What is it, then, you carping, skeptical creature? It's all perfect. An uncongenial, tiresome husband--and she need have no self-reproach about him, either--finally out of the way; a reverential adorer at hand; youth still theirs; money; a delightful place--what more could one ask?"

"Ah," Mrs. Wake sighed a little, "I don't know. It's not, perhaps, that one would ask more, but less. It's too pretty, too easy, too _à propos_; so much so that it frightens me a little. Valerie has, you see, made a mess of it. She has, you see, spoiled her life, in that aspect of it. To mend it now, so completely, to start fresh at--how old is she?--at forty-six, it's just a little glib. Somehow one doesn't get off so easily as that. One can't start so happily at forty-six. Perhaps one is wiser not to try."

"Oh, nonsense, my dear! It's very American, that, you know, that picking of holes in excellent material, furbishing up your consciences, running after your motives as if you were ferrets in a rat-hole. If all you have to say against it is that it's too perfect, too happy,--why, then I keep to my own conviction. She'll be peacefully married and back among us in a year."

Mrs. Wake seemed to acquiesce, yet still to have her reserves. "There's Imogen, you know. Imogen has to be counted with."

"Counted with! Valerie, I hope, is clever enough to manage that young person. It would be a little too much if the daughter spoiled the end of her life as the husband spoiled the beginning."

"You are a bit hard on Everard, you know, from mere partizanship. Valerie was by no means a misused wife and his friends may well have thought him a misused husband; Imogen does, I'm sure. She has, perhaps, a right to feel that, as her father's representative, her mother owes her something in the way of atonement."

"It does vex me, my dear, to have you argue like that against your own convictions. It was all his fault,--one only has to know her to be sure of it. He made things unbearable for her."

"It was hardly his fault. He couldn't help being unbearable."

"Well--certainly _she_ couldn't help it!" cried Mrs. Pakenham, laughing as if this settled it. She rose, putting her hands on the mantelpiece and warming her foot preparatory to her departure; and, summing up her cheerful convictions, she added: "I'm sorry for the poor man, of course; but, after all, he seems to have done very much what he liked with his life. And I can't help being very glad that he didn't succeed in quite spoiling hers. Good luck to Sir Basil is what I say."

III

Mrs. Upton was in the drawing-room next morning when Sir Basil Thremdon was announced. She had not seen this old friend and neighbor since the news of her bereavement had reached her, and now, rising to meet him, a consciousness of all that had changed for her, a consciousness, perhaps more keen, of all that had changed for him, showed in a deepening of her color.

Sir Basil was a tall, spare, stalwart man of fifty, the limpid innocence of his blue eyes contrasting with his lean, aquiline countenance. His hair and mustache were bleached by years to a light fawn-color and his skin tanned by a hardy life to a deep russet; and these tints of fawn and russet predominated throughout his garments with a pleasing harmony, so that in his rough tweeds and riding-gaiters he seemed as much a product of the nature outside as any bird or beast. The air of a delightfully civilized rurality was upon him, an air of landowning, law-dispensing, sporting efficiency; and if, in the fitness of his coloring, he made one think of a fox or a pheasant, in character he suggested nothing so much as one of the deep-rooted oaks of his own park. His very simplicity and uncomplexity of consciousness was as fresh, as wholesome, as genially encompassing, as full summer foliage. One rested in his shade.

He was an inarticulate person and his eyes, now, in their almost seared solicitude, spoke more of sympathy and tenderness than his halting tongue. He ended by repeating a good many times that he hoped she wasn't too frightfully pulled down. Mrs. Upton said that she was really feeling very well, though conscious that her sincerity might somewhat bewilder her friend in his conceptions of fitness, and they sat down side by side on a small sofa near the window.

We have said that for the first years of her freedom Mrs. Upton had been very gay. Of late years the claims on her resources from the family across the Atlantic had a good deal clipped her wings, and, though she made a round of spring and of autumn visits, she spent her time for the most part in her little Surrey house, engaged desultorily in gardening, study, and the entertainment of the friend or two always with her. She had not found it difficult to fold her wings and find contentment in the more nest-like environment. She had never been a woman to seek, accepting only, happily, whatever gifts life brought her; and it seemed as natural to her that things should be taken as that things should be given. But with the renouncement of more various outlooks this autumnal quietness, too, had brought its gift, discreet, delicate, a whispered sentence, as it were, that one could only listen to blindfolded, but that, once heard, gave one the knowledge of a hidden treasure. Sir Basil had been one of the reasons, the greatest reason, for her happiness in the Surrey nest. It was since coming there to live that she had grown to know him so well, with the slow-developing, deep-rooted intimacy of country life. The meadows and parks of Thremdon Hall encompassed all about the heath where Valerie Upton's cottage stood among its trees. They were Sir Basil's woods that ran down to her garden walls and Sir Basil's lanes that, at the back of the cottage, led up, through the heather, to the little village, a mile or so away. She had met Sir Basil before coming to live there, once or twice in London, and once or twice for week-ends at country-houses; but he was not a person whom one came really to know in drawing-room conditions; indeed, at the country-houses one hardly saw him except at breakfast and dinner; he was always hunting, golfing, or playing billiards, and in the interludes to these occupations one found him a trifle somnolent. It was after settling quite under his wing--and that she was under it she had discovered only after falling in love with the little white cottage and rushing eagerly into tenancy--that she had found out what a perfect neighbor he was; then come to feel him as a near friend; then, as those other friends had termed it, to care for him.

Valerie Upton, herself, had never called it by any other name, this feeling about Sir Basil; though it was inevitable, in a woman of her clearness of vision, that she should very soon recognize a more definite quality in Sir Basil's feeling about her. That she had always kept him from naming it more definitely was a feat for which, she well knew it, she could allow herself some credit. Not only had it needed, at some moments, dexterity; it had needed, at others, self-control. Self-control, however, was habitual to her. She had long since schooled herself into the acceptance of her stupidly maimed life, seeing herself in no pathetic similes at all, but, rather, as a foolish, unformed creature who, partly through blindness, partly through recklessness, had managed badly to cripple herself at the outset of life's walk, and who must make the best of a hop-skip-and-jump gait for the rest of it. She had felt, when she decided that she had a right to live away from Everard, that she had no right to ask more of fortune than that escape, that freedom. One paid for such freedom by limiting one's possibilities, and she had never hesitated to pay. Never to indulge herself in sentimental repinings or in sentimental musings, never to indulge others in sentimental relationships, had been the most obvious sort of payment; and if, in regard to Sir Basil, the payment had sometimes been difficult, the reward had been that sense of unblemished peace, that sense of composure and gaiety. It was enough to know, as a justification of her success, that she made him happy, not unhappy. It was enough to know that she could own freely to herself how much she cared for him, so much that, finding him funny, dear, and dull, she was far fonder of his funniness, of his dullness, than of other people's cleverness. He made her feel as if, on that maimed, that rather hot and jaded walk, she had come upon the great oak-tree and sat down to rest in its peaceful shadow, hearing it rustle happily over her and knowing that it was secure strength she leaned against, knowing that the happy rustle was for her, because she was there, peaceful and confident. So it had all been like a gift, a sad, sweet secret that one must not listen to except with blindfolded eyes. She had never allowed the gift to become a burden or a peril. And now, to-day, for the first time, it was as though she could raise the bandage and look at him.