Chapter 20

"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 Tannhäuser 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."

"We make her very welcome when she comes to ours." Imogen did not descend to self-exculpation. She spoke gently and gravely, casting only a glance at Sir Basil, as if calling him to witness her pained magnanimity.

"It would be fun, you know, to help her to start a new one," said Rose;--"something rebellious and anarchic. Will you help me if I do, Eddy? Come, let's sow discord in Imogen's Eden, like a couple of serpents."

Reptilian analogies seemed uppermost this morning; Imogen felt their fitness while, smiling on, she answered: "I don't think that mere rebellion--not only against Eden but against the Tree of Knowledge as well--would carry you far, Rose. Your membership would be of three--Mattie and the two serpents."

Sir Basil laughed out at the retort.

"You evidently don't know the club and all those delightful young women," he said to Rose.

"Oh, yes, indeed I do. Every one sees Imogen's clubs. I don't think them delightful. Women in crowds are always horrid. We are only tolerable in isolation."

"You hand over to us, then,"--it was Jack who spoke, and with his usual impatience when bending to Rose's folly,--"all the civic virtues, all the virtues of fraternity?"

"With pleasure; they are becoming to nobody, for that matter. But I'm quite sure that men are brothers. Women never are sisters, however, unless, sometimes, we are sisters to you," Rose added demurely, at which Sir Basil gave a loud laugh.

Imogen, though incensed, was willing that on this low ground of silly flippancy Rose should make her little triumphs. She kept her smile. "I don't think that those of us who are capable of another sisterhood will agree with you," and her smile turned on Mary another coal of fire, for she suspected Mary of apostasy. "I don't think that the women whose aim in life is--well--to make brothers of men in Rose's sense, can understand sisterhood at all, as, for instance, Mary and I do."

"Oh, you and Mary!"--Rose tapped her eggshell and salted her egg. "That's not sisterhood;--that's prophetess and proselyte. You're an anarchist to the bone, Imogen, like the rest of us;--you couldn't bear to share anything--It's like children playing games:--If I can't be the driver, I won't play horses."

"Oh, Rose!" came in distressed tones from Mary; but Imogen did not flinch from her serenity.

Outside on the veranda, where they all wandered after breakfast, her moment came at last. Jack had walked away with Mary; Miss Bocock, with a newspaper, stood in the shade at a little distance. Rose and Eddy were wandering among the flowers.

Imogen knew, as she found herself alone with Sir Basil, that the impulse that rose in her was the crude one of simply snatching. She controlled its demonstration so that only a certain breathlessness was in her voice, a certain brilliancy in her eye, as she said to him, rapidly:--

"He will never let you see me! Never!"

"He? Who?--What do you mean?" Sir Basil, startled, stared at her.

"Jack! Jack! Haven't you noticed?"

"Oh, I see. Yes, I see." His glance became illuminated. In a voice as low as her own he asked: "What does it mean?--I never can get a word with you. He's always there. He's very devoted to you, I know; but, I supposed that--well, that his chance was over."

His hesitation, the appeal of his glance, were lightning-flashes of assurance for Imogen, opening her path for her.

"It is over;--it is over;--but it's false that he is devoted to me," she whispered. "He hates me. He is my enemy."

"Oh, I say!" gasped Sir Basil.

"And since he failed to win me--Don't you see--It's through sheer spite--sheer hatred."

Her brilliant eyes were on him and a further "Oh!" came from Sir Basil as he received this long ray of illumination. And it was so dazzling, although Imogen, after her speech, had cast down her eyes, revealing nothing more, that he murmured hastily:--"Can't I see you, Imogen, alone;--can't you arrange it in some way?"

Imogen's eyes were still cast down, while, the purpose that was like a possession, once attained, her thoughts rushed in, accused, exculpated, a wild confusion that, in another moment had built for her self-respect the shelter of a theory that, really, quite solidly sustained the statement so astounding to herself when it had risen to her lips. Hatred, spite; yes, these were motives, too, in Jack's treachery; she hadn't spoken falsely, though it had been with the blindness of the overmastering purpose. And her dignity was untarnished in Sir Basil's eyes, for, she had seen it at last, her path was open; she had only to enter it.

Her heart seemed to flutter in her throat as she said on the lowest, most incisive note: "Yes,--I, too, want to see you, Sir Basil. I am so lonely;--you are the only one who cares, who understands, who is near me. There must be real truth between us. This morning--he has prevented that. But to-night, after we have all gone up-stairs, come out again, by the little door at the back, and meet me--meet me--" her voice wavered a little, "at the rustic bench, up in the woods, where we went last night. There we can talk." And catching suddenly at all the nobility, so threatened in her own eyes, remembering her love for him, her great love, and his need, his great need, of her, she smiled deeply, proudly at him and said:

"We will see each other, at last, and each other's truth, under God's stars."

XXVI

Jack had drawn Mary aside, around the sunny veranda, and, out of ear-shot of everybody, a curious intentness in his demeanor, he asked her to run up to Mrs. Upton's room and ask her if she wouldn't take a drive with him that morning. Since the Uptons' impoverishment their little stable was, perforce, empty; and it was Jack who ordered the buggy from the village and treated the company in turn to daily drives.

Mary departed on her errand, hearing Jack telephoning to the livery-stable as she went up-stairs.

She had to own to herself that the charm had grown on her, and the fact of her increasing fondness for Imogen's mother made the clearer to her all the new, vague pain in regard to Imogen. Imogen, to Mary's delicate perception of moral atmosphere, was different; she had felt it from the moment of her arrival. No one had as yet enlightened her as to the Potts's catastrophe, but even by its interpretation she would have found the change hard to understand. Perhaps it was merely that she, Mary, was selfish and felt herself to be of less importance to Imogen. Mary was always conscious of relief when she could fix responsibility upon herself, and she was adjusting all sorts of burdens on her conscience as she knocked at Mrs. Upton's door.

The post had just arrived, and Valerie, standing near her dressing-table, was reading her letters as Mary came in. Mary had never so helplessly felt the sense of charm as this morning.

She wore a long white dressing-gown, of frilled lawn, tied with black ribbons at throat and wrists. Her abundant chestnut hair, delicately veined with white, was braided into two broad plaits that hung below her waist, and her face, curiously childlike so seen, was framed in the banded masses. Mary could suddenly see what she had looked like as a little girl. So moved was she by the charm that, Puritan as she was, she found herself involuntarily saying:--"Oh, Mrs. Upton, what beautiful hair you have."

"It is nice, isn't it?" said Valerie, looking more than ever like a child, a pleased child; "I love my hair."

Mary had taken one braid and was crunching it softly, like spun silk, in her hand. She couldn't help laughing out at the happy acceptance of her admiring speech; the charm was about her; she understood; it wasn't vanity, but something flower-like.

"You have heaps, too," said Valerie.

"Oh, but it's sand-colored. And I do it so horribly. It is so heavy and pulls back so."

"I know; that's the difficulty with heaps of hair. But I had a very clever maid, and she taught me how to manage it. Sand-color is a lovely color as a background to the face, you know."

Valerie rarely made personal remarks and rarely paid compliments. She had none of the winning allurements of the siren; Mary had realized that and was now realizing that genuine interest, even if reticent, may be the most fragrant of compliments.

"I wish you would let me show you how to do it," Valerie added.

Mary blushed. There had always been to her, in her ruthless hair-dressing, an element of severe candor, the recognition of charmlessness, a sort of homage paid to wholesome if bitter fact. Mrs. Upton was not, in her flower-like satisfaction, one bit vain; but Mary suspected herself of feeling a real thrill of tempted vanity. The form of the temptation was, however, too sweet to be rejected, and Mrs. Upton's hair was so simply done, too, though, she suspected, done with a guileful simplicity. It wouldn't look vain to do it like that; but, on the other hand, it would probably take three times as long to do; there was always the question of one's right to employ precious moments in personal adornment. "How kind of you," she murmured. "I am so stupid though. Could I really learn? And wouldn't it take up a good deal of my time every morning?"

Valerie smiled. "Well, it's a nice way of spending one's time, don't you think?"

This was, somehow, quite unanswerable, and Mary had never thought of it in that light. She sat down before Valerie's pretty, tipped mirror and looked with some excitement at the rows of glittering toilet utensils set out before her. She was sure that Mrs. Upton found it nice to spend a great deal of time before her mirror.