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.
She sat beside him in her widow's enfranchising blackness and she couldn't
but seer at last, how deep was that upwelling, inevitable fondness. So
deep that, gazing, as if with new and dazzled eyes, she wondered a little
giddily over the long self-mastery; so deep that she almost felt it as a
strange, unreal tribute to trivial circumstance that, without delay, she
should not lean her head against the dear oak and tell it, at last, that
its shelter was all that she asked of life. It was necessary to banish
the vision by the firm turning to that other, that dark one, of her dead
husband, her grief-stricken child, and, in looking, she knew that while it
was so near she could not dwell on the possibilities of freedom. So she
talked with her friend, able to smile, able, once or twice, to use toward
him her more intimate tone of affectionate playfulness.
"But you are coming back--directly!" Sir Basil exclaimed, when she told him
that she expected her boy in a few days and that they would sail for New
York together.
Not directly, she answered. Before very long, she hoped. So many things
depended on Imogen.
"But she will live with you now, over here."
"I don't think that she will want to leave America," said Valerie. "I don't
think, even, that I want her to."
"But this is your home, now," Sir Basil protested, looking about, as though
for evidences of the assertion, at the intimate comforts of the room. "You
know that you are more at home here than there."
"Not now. My home, now, is Imogen's."
Sir Basil appeared to reflect, and then to put aside reflection as, after
all, inapplicable, as yet, to the situation.
"Well, I must pay America a visit," he said with an unemphatic smile. "I've
not been there for twenty years, you know. I'll like seeing it again, and
seeing you--in Miss Imogen's home."
Valerie again flushed a little. In some matters Sir Basil was anything but
dull, and his throwing, now, of the bridge was most tactfully done. He
intended that she should see it solidly spanning the distance between them
and only time was needed, she knew, to give him his right of walking over
it, and her right--but that was one of the visions she must not look at.
A great many things lay between now and then, confused, anxious, perhaps
painful, things. The figure of Imogen so filled the immediate future that
the place where Sir Basil should take up his thread was blotted into an
almost melancholy haze of distance. But it was good to feel the bridge
there, to know him so swift and so sure.
"She is very clever, your girl, isn't she? I've always felt it from what
you've told me," he said, defining for himself, as she saw, the future
where they were to meet.
"Very, I think."
"Very learned and artistic. I'm afraid she'll find me an awful Philistine.
You must stand up for me with her."
"I will," Valerie smiled, adding, "but Imogen is very pretty, too, you
know."
"Yes, I know; one can see that in the photographs," said Sir Basil. There
were several of these standing about the room and he get up to look at
them, one after the other--Imogen in evening, in day dress, all showing her
erect slenderness, her crown of hair, her large, calm eyes.
"She looks kind but very cool, you know," he commented. "She would take one
in at a great rate; not find much use for an every-day person like me."
"Oh, you won't be an every-day person to Imogen. And her great point, I
think, is her finding a use for everybody."
"Making them useful to her?"
"No--to themselves--to the world in general."
"Improving them, do you mean?"
"Well, yes, I should say that was more it. She likes to give people a
lift."
"But--she's so very young. How does she manage it?" Sir Basil queried over
the photograph, whose eyes dwelt on him while he spoke,
"Oh, you'll see," Valerie smiled a little at his pertinacity. "I've no
doubt that she will improve you."
"Well," said Sir Basil, recognizing her jocund intention, "she's welcome
to try. As long as you are there to see that she isn't too hard on me." He
dismissed Imogen, then, from his sight and thoughts, replacing her on the
writing-table and suggesting that Mrs. Upton should take a little walk with
him. His horse had been put into the stable and he could come back for him.
Mrs. Upton said that when they came back he must stay to lunch and that be
could ride home afterward, and this was agreed on; so that in ten minutes'
time Mrs. Pakenham and Mrs. Wake, from their respective windows, were able
to watch their widowed friend walking away across the heather with Sir
Basil beside her.
Neither spoke much as they wended their way along the little paths of
silvery sand that intersected the common. The day was clear, with a milky,
blue-streaked sky; the distant foldings of the hills were of a deep,
hyacinthine blue.
From time to time Sir Basil glanced at the face beside him, thoughtful to
sadness, its dusky fairness set in black, but attentive, as always, to the
sights and sounds of the well-loved country about her. He liked to watch
the quick glancing, the clear gazing, of her eyes; everything she looked at
became at once more significant to him--the tangle of tenacious roots that
thrust through the greensand soil of the lane they entered, the suave, gray
columns of the beeches above, the blurred mauves and russets of the woods,
the swift, awkward flight of a pheasant that crossed their way with a
creaking whir of wings, the amethyst stars of a bush of Michaelmas daisies,
showing over a whitewashed cottage wall, the far blue distance before them,
framed in the tracery of the beech-boughs. He knew that she loved it all
from the way she looked at it and, almost indignantly, as though against
some foolish threat, he felt himself asseverating, "It _is_ her home--she
knows it--the place she loves like that." And when they had made their wide
round, down the lane, up a grassy dell, into his park, where he had to show
her some trees that must come down; when they had skirted the park, along
its mossy, fern-grown wall, and under its overhanging branches, until, once
more, they were on the common and the white of Valerie's cottage glimmered
before them, he voiced this protest, saying to her, as he watched her eyes,
dwell on the dear little place, "You could never bear to leave all this for
good--even if, even if we let you; you know you couldn't."
Valerie looked round at him, and in his face, against its high background
of milk-streaked blue, she saw the embodiment of his words; it was that,
not the hyacinthine hills, not the beech-woods, not the heathery common,
not even the dear cottage, that she could not bear to leave for good. But
since this couldn't be said, she consented to the symbol of it that he put
before her, that "all this," and answered, as he had hoped, "No, indeed; I
couldn't think of leaving it all, for good."