"Sir Basil!" Valeria exclaimed.
She rose from the tea-table, where she and Jack and Mrs. Wake were sitting,
to meet the unexpected new-comer.
A gladness that Jack had never seen in her seemed to inundate her face,
her figure, her outstretched hands; she looked young, she looked almost
childlike, as she smiled at her friend over their clasp, and Jack saw, by
the light of that transfiguration, how gray these last months must have
been to her, how strangely bereft of response and admiration, how without
savor or sweetness. He saw, and with the insight came a sharp stir of
bitterness against the new-comer, who threw them all like this into a dull
background, and, at the same time, a real echo of her gladness, that she
should have it.
He actually, in the sharp, swift twist of feeling, hardly remembered
Imogen's forecasts and warnings, hardly remembered that Mrs. Upton's
gladness and Sir Basil's beaming gaze put Imogen quite dreadfully in the
right. He did not think of Imogen at all, nor of the desecration of the
house of mourning by this gladness, so absorbed was he in watching it, in
sharing it, and in being hurt by it.
"Mrs. Wake, of course, is an old friend," Valerie said, leading Sir Basil
up to the tea-table; "and here is a new one--Jack Pennington, whom you must
quite know already, I've written so much about him. Sit down here. Tell me
all about everything. Why this sudden appearance? Why no hint of it? Is it
meant as a surprise for us?"
"Well, Frances and Tom were coming over, you knew that--"
"Of course. I wrote Frances a steamer letter the day before yesterday. You
got in this morning with them then? They said not a word of your coming
when I last heard from them."
"I only decided to join them at the last minute. I thought that it would be
good fun to drop upon you like this, so I didn't write. It _is_ good to see
you again." Sir Basil, while his beam seemed to include the room and its
inmates, included them unseeingly; he had eyes, it was evident, only for
her. He went on to give her messages from the Pakenhams, in New York but
for a week on their way to Canada and eager to see her at once. They would
have come with him had they not been rather knocked up by the early rise on
the steamer and by the long wait at the custom-house.
"You must all come with me to-morrow to our tableaux," said Valerie.
"Imogen is in them. She is out this afternoon, so you will see her for the
first time at her loveliest. She is to be Antigone."
"Oh, so I sha'n't see her till to-morrow. I've always been a bit afraid of
Miss Upton, you know," said Sir Basil, with a smile at Jack.
"Well, the first impression will be a reassuring one," said Valerie.
"Antigone is the least alarming of heroines."
"I don't know about that," Sir Basil objected, folding a slice of bread and
butter, "A bit gruesome, don't you think?"
"Gruesome?"
"She stuck so to her own ideas, didn't she? Awfully rough on the poor
fellow who wanted to marry her, insisting like that on burying her
brothers."
Valerie laughed. "Well, but that sense of duty is hardly gruesome; it would
have been horridly gruesome to have left her brothers unburied."
"You'll worst me in an argument, of course," Sir Basil replied, looking
fondly at her; "but I maintain that she's a dreary young lady. Of course I
don't mean to say that she wasn't an exceedingly good girl, and all that
sort of thing, but a bit of a prig, you must allow."
Jack listened to the bantering colloquy. This man, so hard, yet so kindly,
so innocent, yet so mature, was making him feel by every tone, gesture,
glance, oddly boyish and unformed. He was quite sure that he himself was a
great deal cleverer, a great deal more conscious, than Sir Basil; but these
advantages somehow assumed the aspect of schoolboy badges of good conduct
beside a grown-up standard. And, as he listened, he began to understand far
more deeply all sorts of things about Valerie; to see what vacancies she
had had to put up with, to see what fullness she must have missed. And he
began to understand what Imogen, Cassandra-like, had declared, that the
unseasonable fragrance of devotions hovered about her widowed mother; to
remember the ominous "Wait and see."
It showed how far he had traveled when he could recall these words with
impatience: could answer them with: "Well, what of it? Doesn't she deserve
some compensation?"--could quietly place Sir Basil as a no longer hopeless
adorer and feel a thrill of satisfaction, in the realization. Yes, sitting
here here in the house of mourning he could think these things.
But if he was so wide, so tolerant, the very expansion of his sympathies
brought them a finer sensitiveness. Only a tendril-like fineness could
penetrate the complexities of that deeper vision. He began to think of
Imogen, and with a new pity, a new tenderness. How she would be hurt,
and how, more than all, she would be hurt by seeing that he, while
understanding, while sympathizing, should, helplessly, inevitably, be glad
that Sir Basil had come. Poor Imogen,--and poor himself; for where did he
stand among all these shiftings of the scene? He, too, knew the drifting
loneliness and desolation, and though his heart ached for the old nearness
he could not put out his hand to her nor take a step toward her. In
himself, in her, was the change, or the mere fate, that held them parted.
The wrench had come slowly upon them, but, while he ached with the pain
of it, he could already look upon it as accomplished. Only one question
remained to be asked:--Would nothing, no change, no fate, draw them again
together?
For all answer a deep, settled sadness descended upon him.
Sir Basil took himself off before Mrs. Wake seemed to think it tactful to
depart, and since, soon after, she too went, Jack and Valerie were left
alone together.
She turned her bright, soft eyes upon the young man and he recognized in
them the unseeing quality that he had found in Sir Basil's--that happy
preoccupation with inner gladness. She made him think of the bird alighted
to sing on the swaying blade; and she made him think of a fountain released
from winter and springing through sunlight in a murmur and sparkle of
ecstasy. She was young, very young; he almost felt her as young in her
gladness as he in his loneliness and pain. Smiling a trifle nervously, he
said that he was glad, at last, to see something of her old life. "Of your
real life," he added.
"My real life?" she repeated, and her look became more aware of him.
"Yes. Of course, in a sense, all this is something outlived, cast aside,
for you. You've only taken it up for a bit while you felt that it had a
claim upon you; but, once you have settled things, you would,--you would
leave us, of course," said Jack, still smiling.
She was thinking of him now, no longer of herself and of Sir Basil, and
perhaps, as she looked at him, at the thin brown face, the light, deep
eyes, she guessed at a stir of tears under the smile. It was then as if the
fountain sank from its own happy solitude and became a running brook of
sweetness, sad, yet merry. She didn't contradict him. She was sorry that
she couldn't, yet glad that his statement should be so obviously true.
"You mean that I'll go back to my little Surrey cottage, when I settle
things?" she said. "Perhaps, yes. And you will miss me? I will miss you
too, dear Jack. But we will often see each other. And then it may take a
long time to settle all you young people."
Her confidence so startled him, so touched him with pity for its blindness,
that, swiftly, he took refuge in ambiguity.
"Oh, you'll settle us!" he said, wondering in what that settling would
consist, wondering what would happen if Imogen, definitely casting him off,
to put the final settling in that form, were left on her mother's hands.
She would have to settle Imogen in America and what, in the meanwhile,
would become of her "real" life?
But from the mother's confidence, her radiance, that accepted his speech
in its happiest meaning, he guessed that she didn't foresee such a
contingency; he even guessed that, were she brought face to face with it,
she wouldn't accept its unsettling of her own joy as final. The fountain
was too strong to heed such obstacles. It would find its way to the
sunlight. Imogen, in time, would have to accept a step-father.