Chapter 22

He felt that his heart throbbed heavily as he watched it, just catching glimpses, among the trees, of the white bubble of Valerie's parasol slanting against the sun. Yet there was a dullness in his excitement. It was over, at all events. He was sure that the last die was cast. And his own trivial and somewhat indecorous part, of shifter of scenes and puller of strings, was, he felt sure, a thing put by forever. He could help her no longer. And in a sort of apathy, he sat out there in the sunny green, hardly thinking, hardly wondering, conscious only of a hope that had become a mere physical sense of oppression and of an underlying sadness that had become, almost, a physical sense of pain.

He had just consulted his watch and, seeing it wanted but ten minutes to tea-time, had got up and was moving away, when a sudden rustle near him, a pause, a quick, evasive footstep, warned him of some presence as anxious for solitude as himself.

He stood still for a moment, uncertain as to his own best means of retreat, but his stillness misled, for, in another moment, Valerie appeared before him from among the branches of a narrow side path.

She had come up to the woods directly; he saw that, for she still wore her hat; she had come to be alone and to weep; and, as she saw Jack, her pale face was convulsed, with the effort to control her weeping, into a strange rigor of pain and confusion.

"Oh"--he stammered. "Forgive me. I didn't know you were here." He was turning to flee, as if from a sacrilege, when she recalled him.

"Don't--without me. I must go back, too," she said.

She stepped on to the broader path and joined him, and he guessed that she tested, on him, her power to face the others. But, after they had gone a few steps together, she stopped suddenly and put her hands before her face, standing quite still.

And Jack understood that she was helpless and that he must say nothing. She stood so for a long moment, not trusting herself to move or speak. Then, uncovering her face, she showed him strange eyes from which the tears had been crushed back.

"And--I can do nothing?--" he said at last, on the lowest breath, as they walked on.

"Nothing, dear Jack."

"When you are suffering like that!"

"I have no right to such suffering. I must hide it. Help me to hide it, Jack. Do I look fairly decent?" She turned her face to him, with, he thought, the most valorous smile he had ever seen.

Only a thin screen of leaves was between them and the open.

"You look--beautiful," said Jack. She smiled on, as though that satisfied her, and he added, "Can I know nothing?--See nothing?"

"I think already," said Valerie, "that you see more than I ever meant any one to see."

"I?--I see nothing, now," he almost moaned.

"You shall. I'll talk to you later."

"You will? If only you knew how I cared!"

"I do, dear Jack."

"Not how much, not how much. You can't know that. It almost gives me my right, you know, to see. When will you talk to me?"

"Some time to-night, when we can have a quiet moment. I'll tell you about the things that have happened--nothing to make you sad, I hope. And I'll ask you some questions, too, Jack, about your very odd behavior!"

Really she was wonderful; it was almost her own gaiety, flickering like pale sunlight upon her face, that she had regained, and, as they went together over the lawn to where the tea-table was laid in the shade, he saw that she could face them all. No one would know. And her last words had given him heart, had lifted, a little, the heavy weight of foreboding. Perhaps, perhaps, her grief wasn't for herself. "Oh, but I can't be candid till you are," he said, the new hope shining in his eyes.

"Oh, yes, you will be," she returned. "You won't ask me to be candid. You'll give and not ask to get back. I know you, Jack."

No one could guess; Sir Basil least of all. That was apparent to Jack as he watched them all sitting at tea under the apple-trees. Sir Basil had never looked so radiant, so innocent of any connection with suffering. He exclaimed over the beauties of their long drive. They had crossed hill and dale; they had lost their way; they had had lunch at a village hotel, an amusing lunch, ending with ice-cream and pie, and, from the undiminished reflection of his contentment on Valerie's features, Jack knew that any faintest hint of the pale, stricken anguish of the woodlands had never for an instant hovered during the drive. This was the face that Sir Basil had seen for all the happy, sunny, picnic day, this face of gay tranquillity.

Sir Basil and Mrs. Upton, indeed, expressed what gaiety there was among the group. Mary, in her blue lawn, looked very dreary. Rose and Eddy were ill-tempered, their day, plainly, having ended in a quarrel. As for Imogen, Jack had felt her heavy eye rest upon him and her mother as they came together over the lawn, and felt it rest upon her mother and Sir Basil steadily and somberly, while they sat about the tea-table. The long drive, Sir Basil's radiance, her mother's serenity, how must they look to Imogen? Jack could conjecture, though knowing, for his own bitter mystification, that what they looked like was perhaps not what they meant. Imogen must be truly at bay, and he felt a cruel satisfaction in the thought of her hidden, her gnawing anxiety. He was aware of every ring of falsity in her placid voice and of every flash of fierceness under the steeled calmness of her eye. He noticed, too, for the rest of the day, that, whatever Imogen's desperation, she made no effort to see Sir Basil alone. Almost ostentatiously she went away to her room after tea, saying that she had had bad news of an invalid _protégé_ and must write to her. She paused, as she went, to lean over Mary, a caressing hand upon her shoulder, and to speak to her in a low tone. Mary grew very red, stammered, and said nothing.

"Miss Upton overworks, I think," observed Miss Bocock. "I've thought that she seemed overstrained all day."

Mary had risen too, and as she wandered away into the flower garden, Jack followed her.

"See here," he said, "has Imogen been hurting you again?"

"No, Jack, oh no;--I'm sure she doesn't mean to hurt."

"What did she say to you just now?"

"Well, Jack, you did bring it upon yourself, and upon me"--

"What was it?"

"She said that she couldn't bear to see her white flower--that's I, you know,"--Mary blushed even deeper in repeating the metaphor--"used for unworthy ends. She meant, of course, I see that,--she meant that what she said at lunch was for you and not for me. I'm sure that Imogen _means_ to be kind--always."

"I believe she does."

"I'm glad that you feel that, too, Jack. It is so horrible to see oneself as--oh, really disloyal sometimes."

"You need never feel that, Mary."

"Oh, but I do. And now, when everything, every one, seems turning against Imogen! And she has seemed different;--yet for two years she has been a revelation of everything noble to me."

"You only saw her in noble circumstances."

"Oh, Jack," Mary's eyes were full of tears as she looked at him now, "that's the worst of all; that you have come to speak of her like that."

XXVIII

Even Valerie couldn't dispel the encompassing cloud of gloom at dinner. One couldn't do much in such a fog but drift with it. And Jack saw that she was fit for no more decisive action.

Imogen, pale, and almost altogether silent, said that she was very tired, and went up-stairs early. Rose and Eddy, in a shaded corner of the drawing-room, engaged in a long altercation. The others talked, in desultory fashion, till bedtime. No one seemed fit for more than drifting.

It was hardly eleven when Jack was left alone with Mrs. Upton.

"You are tired, too," he said to her; "dreadfully tired. I mustn't ask for our talk."

"I should like a little stroll in the moonlight." Valerie, at the open window, was looking out. "In a night or two it will be too late for us to see. We'll have our walk and our talk, Jack."

She rang for her white chuddah, told the maid to put out the lamps, and that she and Mr. Pennington would shut the house when they came in. From the darkened house they stepped into the warm, pale night. They went in silence over the lawn and, with no sense of choice, took the mossy path that led to the rustic bench where they had met that afternoon.

It was not until they were lost in the obscurity of the woods that Valerie said, very quietly: "Do you remember our talk, Jack, on that evening in New York, after the tableaux?"

He had followed along the path just behind her; but now he came to her side so that he could see her shadowy face. "Yes;--the evening in which we saw that Imogen and Sir Basil were going to be friends."

"And the evening," said Valerie, "when you showed me plainly, at last, that because I seemed gold to you, Imogen's blue had turned to green."

"Yes;--I remember."

"It has faded further and further away, her blue, hasn't it?"

"Yes," he confessed.

"So that you are hardly friends, Jack?"

He paused for a moment, and then completed his confession:--"We are not friends."

Valerie stood still, breathing as if with a little difficulty after the gradual ascent. The tall trees about them were dark and full of mystery on the pale mysterious sky. Through the branches they could see the glint of the moon's diminished disk.

"That is terrible, you know," said Valerie, after they had stood in silence for some moments.

"I know it."

"For both of you."

"Worse for me, because I cared more, really cared more."

"No, worse for her, for it is you who have judged and rejected her."

"She thinks that it is she who has judged and rejected me."

"She tries to think it; she does not always succeed. It has been bitter, it has been cruel for her."

"Oh, yes, bitter and cruel," he assented.

"Don't try to minimize her pain, Jack."

"You feel that I can't care, much?"

"It is horrible for me to feel it. Think of her when I came, so secure, so calm, so surrounded by love and appreciation. And now"--Valerie walked on, as if urged to motion by the controlled force of her own insistence. Was it an appeal to him that Imogen, dispossessed of the new love, might find again the old love opening to her? He clung to the hope, though with a sickening suspicion of its folly.

"By my coming, I have robbed her of everything," Valerie was saying, walking swiftly up the path and breathing as if with that slight difficulty--the sound of her breaths affected him with an almost intolerable sense of expectancy. "She isn't secure;--she isn't calm. She is warped;--her faiths are warped. Her friends are changed to her. She has lost you. It's as if I had shattered her life."

"Everything that wasn't real you have shattered."

The rustic bench was reached and they paused there, though with no eyes for the shaft of mystic distance that opened before them. Jack's eyes were on her and he was conscious of a rising insistence in himself that matched and opposed her own.

"But you must be sorry for her pain," said Valerie, and now, with eyes almost stern in their demand, she gazed at him;--"you must be sorry that she has had to lose so much. And you would be glad, would you not, to think that real things, a new life, were to come to her?"

He understood; even before the words, his fear, his presage, leaped forward to this crashing together of all his hopes. And it seemed to him that a flame passed through him, shriveling in its ardent wrath all trite reticences and decorums.

"No; no, I should not be glad," he answered. His voice was violent; the eyes he fixed on her were violent. His words struck Imogen out of his life for ever.

"Why are you so cruel?" she faltered.

"I am cruel for _you_. I know what you want to do. You are going to give her _your_ life."

Quick as a flash she answered--it was like a rapier parrying his stroke:--"Give?--what have I to do with it, if it comes to her?"

"Everything! Everything!" he cried.

"Nothing. You are mistaken."

"Ah,--you could keep it, you could keep it--if you tried." And now his eyes pleaded--pleaded with her, for her own life's sake, to keep what was hers. "You have only to _show_ her to him, as you did to me."

"You think--I could do that!--to my child!"--Through the darkness her white face looked a wild reproach at him.

He seized her hands:--"It's to do her no wrong!--It's only to be true, consciously, to him, as you were true, unconsciously, to me. It's only, not to let her rob you--not to let her rob him."

"Jack," she breathed heavily, "these are things that cannot be said."

"They must--they must--now, between us. I have my right. I've cared enough--to do anything, so that she should not rob you!" Jack groaned.

"She has not robbed me. It left me;--it went to her;--I saw it all. Even if I had been base enough, even if I had tried to keep it by showing her to him--as you say so horribly,--even then I should not have kept it. He would not have seen. Don't you understand;--he is not that sort of man. She will always be blue to him, and I will always be gold--though perhaps, now, a little tarnished. That's what is so beautiful in him--and so stupid. He doesn't see colors, as you and I do, Jack. That's what makes me sure that this is the happiest of fortunes for them both."

He had held her hands, gazing at her downcast face, its strength speaking from the shadow, its pain hidden from him, and now, before her resolution and her gentleness, he bent his head upon the hands he held. "Oh, but _you, you, you_!--It's _you_ whose life is shattered!" broke from him with a sob.

For a long while she stood silent above him, her hands enfolding his, as though she comforted his grief. He found himself at length kissing the gentle hands, with tears, and then, caressing his bent head with a light touch, she said: "Don't you see that the time has come for me to accept shatterings as in the order of things, dear Jack?--My mistake has been to believe that life can begin over again. It can't. One uses it up--merely by waiting. I've been an incurable girl till now;--and now, I've crashed from girlhood to middle-age in a week! It's been a crash, of course; the sort of crash one never mends of; but after to-day, after you sent me off with him, Jack, and I allowed myself, in spite of all my dread, my pride, my relinquishment, just one flicker of girlish hope,--after all this, I think that I must put on caps to show that I am really old at last."

He lifted his head and looked at her. Her face was lovely, with the silver disk of the moon above it and, about it, the mystery and sadness of the tranquil woods. So lovely, so young, with almost the trembling touch of a tender mockery, like the trembling of moonlit water, upon it. And all that he found to say at last was:--"What a fool he is."

She really smiled then, though tears sprang to her eyes with her comprehension of all that the helpless, boyish words struggled to subdue.

"Thanks for that, dear Jack,--and for all the other mistakes," she said.

There seemed nothing more to say, no questions to ask, or to answer. He must accept from her that her plight was irrevocable. It was as if he had seen a great stone rolled over the quivering, springing, shining fountain, sealing it, stilling it for ever. And, for his part, her word covered all. His "mistakes" needed no further revealing.

They had turned and, in silence, were moving down the path again, when they heard, suddenly, the sound of light, swift footsteps approaching them. They paused, exchanging a glance of wonder; and Jack thought that he saw fear in Valerie's eyes. The day, already, had held overmuch of endurance for her, and it was not yet ended. In another moment, tall and illumined, Imogen appeared before them in the path.

Jack knew, in thinking it over afterward, that Imogen at her most baleful had been Imogen at her most beautiful. She had looked, as she emerged from shadow into light, like a virgin saint bent on some wild errand through the night, an errand brought to a proud pause, in which was no fear and no hesitancy, as her path was crossed by the spirits of an evil world. That was really just what she looked like, standing there before them, bathed in light, her eyes profound and stern, her hair crowning her with a glory of transmuted gold, her head uplifted with a high, unfaltering purpose. That the shock of finding them there before her was great, one saw at once; and one could gage the strength of her purpose from her instantaneous surmounting of the shock.

And it was strange, in looking back, to remember how the time of colorless light and colorless shadow had seemed to divest them all of daily conventions and daily seemings. They might have been three disembodied souls met there in the moonlit woods and speaking the direct, unimpeded language of souls, for whom all concealments are useless.

"Oh--it is _you_," was what Imogen said; much as the virgin saint might have greeted the familiar demons who opposed her quest. _You_, meant both of them. She put them together into one category of evil, saw them as one in their enmity to her and to good. And she seemed to accept them as very much what a saint might expect to find on such a nocturnal errand.

Involuntarily Valerie had fallen back, and she had put her hand on Jack's shoulder in confusion more than in fear. Yet, feeling a menace in the white, shining presence, her voice faltered as she asked: "Imogen, what are you doing here?"

And it was at this point that Imogen reached, really, her own culmination. Whatever shame, whatever hesitation, whatever impulsion to deceive when deception was so easy, she may have felt; to lie, when a lie would be so easily convincing, she rejected and triumphed over. Jack knew from her uplifted look that the moment would count with her always as one of her great ones one of the moments in which--as she had used to say to him sometimes in the days that were gone forever--one knew that one had "beat down Satan under one's feet."

"You have no right to ask me that," she said, "but I choose to answer you. I have come here to meet Sir Basil."

"Meet him?" It was in pure bewilderment that Valerie questioned, helplessly, without reproach.

"Meet him. Yes. What have you to say to it?"

"But why meet him?--Why now?" The wonder on Valerie's face had broken to almost merriment. "Did he ask you to?--Really, really, he oughtn't to. Really, my child, I can't have you meeting Sir Basil in the woods at midnight."

"You can't have me meeting him in the woods at midnight?" Imogen repeated, an ominous cadence, holding her head high and taking long breaths. "You say that, dare say it, when you well know that I can meet him nowhere else and in no other way. It was _I_ who asked him to meet me here and it is here, confronted with you, if you so choose; it is here, before you and under God's stars, that I shall know the truth from him. I am not ashamed; I am proud to say it;--I love him. And though you scheme, and stoop and strive to take him from me--you, with Jack to help you--Jack to lie for you--as he did this morning,--I know, I know in my heart and soul that he loves me, that he is mine."

"Jack!--Jack!" Valerie cried. She caught him back, for he started forward to seize, to gag her daughter; "Jack--remember, remember!--She doesn't understand!"

"Oh, he may strike me if he wills." Imogen had stood quite still, not flinching.

"I don't want to strike you--you--you idiot!"--Jack was gasping. "I want to force you to your knees, before your mother--who loves you--as no one else who knows you will ever love you!" And, helplessly, his old words, so trite, so inadequate, came back to him. "You self-centered, you self-righteous, you cold-hearted girl!"

Valerie still held his arm with both hands, leaning upon him.

"Imogen," she said, speaking quickly, "you needn't meet Sir Basil in this way;--there is nothing to prevent you from seeing him where and when you will. You are right in believing that he loves you. He asked me this morning for your hand. And I gave him my consent."

From a virgin saint Imogen, as if with the wave of a wand, saw herself turned into a rather foolish genie, so transformed and then, ever so swiftly, run into a bottle;--it was surely the graceful seal firmly affixed thereto when she heard these words of conformity to the traditions of dignified betrothal. And for once in her life, so bottled and so sealed, she looked, as if through the magic crystal of her mother's words, absolutely, helplessly foolish. It is difficult for a genie in a bottle to look contrite or stricken with anything deeper than astonishment; nor is it practicable in such a situation to fall upon one's knees,--if a genie were to feel such an impulse of self-abasement. It was perhaps a comfort to all concerned, including a new-comer, that Imogen should be reduced to the silence of sheer stupefaction; and as Sir Basil appeared among them it was not at him, after her first wide glance, that she looked, but, still as if through the crystal bottle, at her mother, and the look was, at all events, a confession of utter inadequacy to deal with the situation in which she found herself.

It was Valerie, once more, who steered them all past the giddy whirlpool. Jack, beside her, his heart and brain turning in dizzy circles, marveled at her steadiness of eye, her clearness of voice. He would have liked to lean against a tree and get his breath; but this delicate creature, rising from her rack, could move forward to her place beside the helm, and smile!

"Sir Basil," she said, and she put out her hand to him so mildly that Sir Basil may well have thought his rather uncomfortable _rendezvous_ redeemed into happiest convention, "here we all are waiting for you, and here we are going to leave you, you and Imogen, to take a walk and to say some of all the things you will have to say to each other. Give me your hand, Imogen. There, dear friend, I think that it is yours, and I trust her life to you with, my blessing. Now take your walk, I will wait for you, as late as you like, in the drawing-room."

So was the bottled genie released, so did it resume once more the figure of a girl, hardly humbled, yet, it must be granted, deeply confused. In perfect silence Imogen walked away beside her suitor, and it may be said that she never told him of the little episode that had preceded his arrival. Jack and Valerie went slowly on toward the house. Now that she had grasped the helm through the whirlpool he almost expected that she would fall upon the deck. But, silently, she walked beside him, not taking his arm, wrapped closely in her shawl, and, once more inside the dark drawing-room, she proceeded to light the candles on the mantel-piece, saying that she would wait there until the others came in, smiling very faintly as she added:--"That everything may be done properly and in order." Jack walked up and down the room, his hands deeply thrust into the pockets of his dining-jacket.

"As for you, you had better go to bed," Valerie went on after a moment. She had placed the candles on a table, taken a chair near them and chosen a review. She turned the pages while she spoke.

At this, he, too, being disposed of, he stopped before her. "And you wanted me to be glad!"

Her eyes on the unseen print, she turned her pages, and now that they were out of the woods and surrounded by walls and furniture and everyday symbols, he saw that the pressure of his presence was heavier, and that she blushed a deep, weary blush. But she was able and willing quite to dispose of him. "I want you to be glad," she answered.

"For her!"--For that creature!--his words implied.

"It was natural, what she thought," said Valerie after a moment, though not looking up.

"Natural!--To suspect you!"--

"Of what you wanted me to do?" Valerie asked. "Yes, it was quite natural, I think, and partly because of your manoeuvers, my poor Jack. I understand it all now. But the cause you espoused was already a doomed one, you see."