XVIII

It was almost four o'clock by the time that Imogen and Sir Basil reached

the summit of one of the lower hills, and, among the trees, came upon the

white glimmer of the Upton's summer home. It stood in a wide clearing

surrounded on three sides by the woods, the higher ranges rising about it,

its lawn running down to slopes of long grass, thick with tall daisies

and buttercups. Farther on was an orchard, and then, beyond the dip of a

valley, the blue, undulating distance, bathed in a crystalline quivering.

The house, of rough white stucco, had lintels and window-frames of dark

wood, a roof of gray shingles, and bright green shutters. A wide veranda

ran around it, wreathed in vines and creepers, and borders of flowers

grew to the edges of the woods. Sir Basil thought that he had never seen

anything prettier. Valerie, dressed in thin black, was sitting on the

veranda, and beside her Miss Bocock, still in traveling dress, looked

incongruously ungraceful. She had arrived an hour before with the Pottses,

who had gone to their rooms, and said, in answer to Imogen's kindly

queries, that the journey hadn't been bad, though the train was very

stuffy. Then it appeared that Miss Bocock and Sir Basil were acquainted;

they recollected each other, shook hands heartily, and asked and answered

local questions. Miss Bocock's people lived not so many miles from Thremdon

Hall, and, though she had been little at home of late years, she and Sir

Basil had country memories in common. She said presently that she, too,

would like to tidy for the tea, and Imogen, taking her to her room, sat

with her while she smoothed out one section of her hair and tonged the

other, and while she put on a very stiff holland skirt and a blouse

distressing to Imogen's sensitive taste, a crude pink blouse, irrelevantly

adorned about the shoulders with a deep frill of imitation lace. While she

dressed she talked, in her high-pitched, cheerful voice, of the recent very

successful lectures she had given in Boston and the acquaintances she had

made there.

"I hope that my letters of introduction proved useful," said Imogen. She

considered Miss Bocock her _protégée_, but Miss Bocock, very vexatiously,

seemed always oblivious of that fact; so that Imogen, though feeling that

she had secured a guest who conferred luster, couldn't resist, now and

then, trying to bring her to a slightly clearer sense of obligation.

Miss Bocock said that, yes, they had been very useful, and Imogen watched

her select from the graceful nosegay on her dressing-table two red roses

which she pinned to her pink blouse with a heavy silver brooch

representing, in an encircling bough, a mother bird hovering with

outstretched wings over a precariously placed nest.

"Let me get you a white rose," Imogen suggested; but Miss Bocock said, no,

thanks, she was very fond of that shade of red.

"So you know Sir Basil," said Imogen, repressing her sense of irritation.

"Know him? Yes, of course. Everybody in the county knows him. He is the big

man thereabouts, you see. The old squire, his father, was very fond of my

father, and we go to a garden-party at the hall once a year or so. It's a

nice old place."

Imogen felt some perplexity. "But if your father and his were such friends

why don't you see more of each other?"

Miss Bocock looked cheerfully at her. "Why, because he is big and we

aren't. We are middle-class and he very much upper; it's a very old family,

the Thremdons,--I forget for how many generations they have been in Surrey.

Now my dear old dad was only a country doctor," Miss Bocock went on, seated

in a rocking-chair--she liked rocking-chairs--with her knees crossed, her

horribly shaped patent-leather shoes displayed and her clear eyes, through

their glasses, fixed on Imogen while she made these unshrinking statements;

"and a country doctor's family hasn't much to do with county people."

"What an ugly thing," said Imogen, while, swiftly, her mind adjusted itself

to this new seeing of Miss Bocock. By its illumination Miss Bocock's

assurance toward herself grew more irritating than before, and the fact

that Miss Bocock's flavor was very different from Sir Basil's became

apparent.

"Not at all," said Miss Bocock. "It's a natural crystallization. You are

working toward the same sort of thing over here--only not in such a

wholesome way, I think."

Imogen flushed a little. "Our crystallizations, when they aren't

artificially brought about by apings of your civilization, take place

through real superiority and fitness. A woman of your intellectual ability

is anybody's equal in America."

"Oh, as far as that goes, in that sense, I'm anybody's equal in England,

too," said Miss Bocock, unperturbed and unimpressed.

Imogen rather wished she could make her feel that, since crystallizations

were a fact, the Uptons, in that sense, were as much above her as the

Thremdons. Idealist democrat as she counted herself, she had these quick

glances at a standard kept, as it were, for private use; as if, from under

an altar in the temple of humanity, its priest were to draw out for some

personal reassurance a hidden yard-measure.

Tea, when they went down again, was served on the veranda and Imogen could

observe, during its progress, that Miss Bocock showed none of the

disposition to fawn on Sir Basil that one might have expected from a person

of the middle-class. She contradicted him as cheerfully as she did Imogen

herself.

Mr. and Mrs. Potts had gone for a little ramble in the lower woods,

but they soon appeared, Mr. Potts seating himself limply on the steps

and fanning himself with his broad straw hat--a hat that in its very

largeness and looseness seemed to express the inflexible ideals of

non-conformity--while Mrs. Potts, very firmly busked and bridled, her head

very sleek, her smile very tight, took a chair between Mrs. Upton and Sir

Basil, and soon showed, in her whole demeanor, a consciousness of the

latter's small titular decoration that placed her more definitely for

Imogen's eye than she had ever been placed before. The Pottses were

middle-class with a vengeance. Imogen's irritation grew as she watched

these limpet-like friends, one sprawling and ill-at-ease for all his

careful languor, the other quite dreadfully well-mannered, sipping her

tea, arching her brows and assuming all sorts of perilous elegancies of

pronunciation that Imogen had never before heard her attempt. It was an

additional vexation to have them display toward herself, with even more

exaggeration than usual, their tenacious tenderness; listening, with a

grave turning of head and eye when she spoke, and receiving each remark

with an over-emphasis of feeling on their over-mobile features.

There was, indeed, an odd irony in the Pottses being there at all. They

had, in her father's lifetime, only been asked with a horde of their kind,

the whole uplifted batch thus worked off together, and Imogen had really

not expected her mother to agree to her suggestion that they should be

invited to pay the annual visit during Sir Basil's stay. She would not own

to herself that her suggestion had been made from a vague wish to put her

mother to a test, to force her into a definite declaration against the

incongruous guests; she had thought of the suggestion, rather, as an

upholding of her father's banner before the oncoming betrayal; but, instead

of refusal, she had met with an instant, happy acquiescence, and it was now

surely the climax of irony to see how her mother, for her sake, bore with

them. More than for her sake, perhaps. Imogen detected in those seemingly

indolent, yet so observant, eyes a keen reading of the Pottses' perturbed

condition, and in her manner, so easy and so apt, the sweetest, lightest

kindness. She turned corners and drew veils for them, spread a warm haze

of interest and serenity about their clumsy and obtruding personalities.

Imogen could even see that the Pottses were reconsidering, with some

confusion of mind, their old verdict on her mother.

This realization brought to her brooding thoughts a sudden pang of

self-reproach. It wouldn't do for the Pottses to find in her mother the

cordiality they might miss in herself. She confessed that, for a moment,

she had allowed the banner to trail in the dust of worldly thoughts, the

banner to which the Pottses, poor dears, had rallied for so many loyal

years. She summoned once more all her funds of spiritual appreciation and

patience. As for Miss Bocock, she made not the slightest attempt to talk

to the Pottses. She had come up with them from the station,--they had not

found each other on the train,--and she had probably had her fill of them

in that time. Once or twice, in the act of helping herself plentifully to

cake, she paused to listen to them, and after that looked away, over their

heads or through them, as if she finally dismissed them from the field of

her attention. Mrs. Potts was questioning Sir Basil about his possible

knowledge of her own English ancestry. "We came over in the _Mayflower_,

you know," she said.

"Really," said Sir Basil, all courteous interest.

"The Claremonts, you know," said Mrs. Potts, modestly, yet firmly, too. "My

father was in direct descent; we have it all worked out in our family

tree."

"Oh, really," said Sir Basil again.

"I've no doubt," said Mrs. Potts, "that your forebears and mine, Sir Basil,

were friends and comrades in the spacious times of good Queen Bess."

Imogen, at this, glanced swiftly at her mother; but she caught no trace of

wavering on that mild countenance.

"Oh, well, no," Sir Basil answered. "My people were very little country

squires in those days; we didn't have much to do with the Dukes of

Claremont. We only began to go up, you see, a good bit after you were on

the top."

Imogen fixed a calm but a very cold eye upon Mrs. Potts. She had heard

of the Dukes of Claremont for many years; so had everybody who knew Mrs.

Potts; they were an innocent, an ingrained illusion of the good lady's, but

to-day they seemed less innocent and more irritating than usual. Imogen

felt that she could have boxed Mrs. Potts's silly ears. In Sir Basil's

pleasant disclaimers, too, there was an echo of Miss Bocock's

matter-of-fact acknowledgments that seemed to set them both leagues away

from the Pottses and to make their likeness greater than their difference.

"Well, of course," Mrs. Potts was going on, her _pince-nez_ and all her

small features mingled, as it were, in the vividest glitter, "for me, I

confess, it's blood, above all and beyond all, that counts; and you and I,

Sir Basil, know that it is in the squirearchy that some of the best blood

in England is found. We don't recognize an aristocracy in our country, Sir

Basil, but, though not recognized, it rules,--blood must rule; one often,

in a democracy, feels that as one's problem."

"It's only through service that it rules," Mr. Potts suddenly ejaculated

from where he sat doubled on the steps looking with a gloomy gaze into the

distance. "Service; service--that's our watchword. Lend a hand."

Imogen saw a latent boredom piercing Sir Basil's affability. Great truths

uttered by some lips might be made to seem very unefficacious. She proposed

to him that she should show him the wonderful display of mountain-laurel

that grew higher up among the pine-woods. He rose with alacrity, but Mrs.

Potts rose too. Imogen could hardly control her vexation when, nipping the

crumbs from her lap and smoothing the folds at her waist, she declared that

she was just in the humor for a walk and must see the laurel with them.

"You mustn't tire yourself. Wouldn't you rather stay and have another cup

of tea and talk to me?" Mrs. Upton interposed, so that Imogen felt a dart

of keen gratitude for such comprehension; but Mrs. Potts was not to be

turned aside from her purpose. "Thank you so much, dear Mrs. Upton," she

answered; "we must have many, many talks indeed; but I do want to see my

precious Imogen, and to see the laurel with her. You are one of those rare

beings, darling Imogen, with whom one can _share_ nature. Will you come,

too, Delancy, dear?" she asked her husband, "or will you stay and talk to

Mrs. Upton and Miss Bocock? I'm sure that they will be eager to hear of

this new peace committee of ours and zestful to help on the cause."

Mr. Potts rather sulkily said that he would stay and talk to Mrs. Upton and

Miss Bocock about the committee, and Imogen felt that it was in a manner of

atonement to him for her monopolization of a lustrous past that Mrs. Potts

presently, as they began the steep ascent along a winding, mossy path, told

Sir Basil that her husband, too, knew the responsibility and burden of

"blood." And as, for a moment, they went before her, Imogen fancied that

she heard the murmur of quite a new great name casting its ægis about Mr.

Potts. Very spiritual people could, she reflected, become strangely

mendacious when borne along on the wings of ardor and exaltation.

Mrs. Potts's presence was really quite intolerable, and, as she walked

behind her and listened to her murmur, Imogen bethought her of an amusing,

though rather ruthless, plan of elimination. Imogen was very capable of

ruthlessness when circumstances demanded it. Turning, therefore, suddenly

to the right, she led them into a steep and rocky path that, as she well

knew, would eventually prove impassable to Mrs. Potts's short legs and

stiff, fat person. Indeed, Mrs. Potts soon began to pant and sigh. Her

recital of the family annals became disconnected; she paused to take off

and rub her eyeglasses and presently asked, in extenuated tones, if this

were the usual path to the laurel.

"It's the one I always take, dear Mrs. Potts; it's the one I wanted Sir

Basil to see, it's so far the lovelier. One gets the most wonderful, steep

views down into far depths of blue," Imogen, perched like a slender

Valkyrie on the summit of a crag above, thus addressed her perturbed

friend.

She couldn't really but be amused by Mrs. Potts's pertinacity, for, not

yet relinquishing her purpose, she continued, in silence now, her lips

compressed, her forehead beaded with moisture, to scale the difficult way,

showing a resolute nimbleness amazing in one so ill-formed for feats of

agility. Sir Basil gave her a succoring hand while Imogen soared ahead,

confident of the moment when Mrs. Potts, perforce, must fall back.

"Tiresome woman!" she thought, but she couldn't help smiling while she

thought it, and heard Mrs. Potts's deep breath laboring up behind her. It

was, perhaps, rather a shame to balk her in this way; but, after all, she

was to have a full fortnight of Sir Basil and she, Imogen, felt that

on this day, the day of a new friendship, Sir Basil's claim on her was

paramount. She had something for him, a light, a strengthening, and she

must keep the hour sacred to that stir of awakening. Among the pines and

laurels she would say a few more words of help to him. So that Mrs. Potts

must be made to go.

The moment came. A shoulder of rock overhung the way and the only passage

was over its almost perpendicular surface. Imogen, as if unconscious of

difficulty, with a stride, a leap, a swift clutch of her firm white hand,

was at the top, smiling down at them and saying: "Now here the view is our

very loveliest. One looks down for miles."

"But--my dear Imogen--is there no other way, round it, perhaps?" Mrs. Potts

looked desperately into the thick underbrush on either side.

"No other way," said Imogen. "But you can manage it. This is only the

beginning,--there's some real climbing farther on. Put your foot where I

did--no, higher--near the little fern--your hand here, look, do you see?

Take a firm hold of that--then a good spring--and here you are."

Poor Mrs. Potts laid a faltering hand on the high ledge that was only a

first stage in the chamois-like feat, and Imogen saw unwilling

relinquishment in her eye.

"I don't see as I can do it," she murmured, relapsing, in her distress,

into a helpless vernacular.

"Oh, yes, this is nothing. Sir Basil will give you a push. I'll pull you

and he will push you," Imogen, with kindest solicitude, suggested.

"Oh, I don't see as I _can_," Mrs. Potts repeated, looking rather wild at

the vision of such a push. She didn't at all lend herself to pushes, and

yet, facing even the indignities of that method, she did, though faltering,

place herself in position; did lay a desperate hold of the high ledge,

place her small, fat, tightly buttoned foot high beside the fern; allow Sir

Basil, with a hand under each armpit, to kindly count "One-two-three--now

for it!"--did even, at the word of command, make a passionate jump, only to

lose hold, scrape lamentably down the surface of the rock, and collapse

into his arms.

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" said Imogen, looking down upon them while Sir Basil

placed Mrs. Potts upon her feet, and while Mrs. Potts, angered almost to

tears, rubbed with her handkerchief at the damage done to her dress. "I'm

so _very_ sorry, dear Mrs. Potts. I see that it is a little too steep for

you. And I did so want you to see this view."

"I shall have to go back. I am very tired, quite exhausted," said Mrs.

Potts, in a voice that slightly shook. "I wish you had taken the usual

path. I never dreamed that we were setting out on such a--such a violent

expedition."

"But this is my usual path," said Imogen, opening her eyes. "I've never

found it hard. And I wanted you and Sir Basil to see my view. But, dear

Mrs. Potts, let me go back with you. Sir Basil won't mind finding his way

alone, I'm sure."

"Oh, no, thanks! No, I couldn't think of spoiling your walk. No, I will go

back," and Mrs. Potts, turning away, began to retrace her steps.

"Be sure and lie down and rest; take a little nap before dinner," Imogen

called after her.

Mrs. Potts disappeared, and Imogen, when she and Sir Basil stood together

on the fortunate obstacle, said: "Poor, excellent creature. I _am_ sorry.

She is displeased with me. I ought to have remembered that this was too

rough for her and taken the other path." Indeed, she had felt rather guilty

as Mrs. Potts's back, the ridge of its high stays strongly marked by the

slanting sunlight, descended among the sylvan scenery.

"Yes, and she did so want to come, awfully keen on it," said Sir Basil;

"but I hope you won't think me very brutal if I confess that _I'm_ not

sorry. I want to talk to you, you see," Sir Basil beamed.

"I would rather talk to you, too," Imogen smiled. "My good old friend can

be very wearisome. But it was thoughtless of me to have brought her on this

way."

They rested for a little while on their rock, looking down into the

distance that was, indeed, worth any amount of climbing. And afterward,

when they reached the fairyland where the laurel drifted through the pine

woods, and as she quoted "Wood-Notes" to him and pointed out to him the

delicate splendors of the polished green, the clear, cold pink, on a

background of gray rock, Imogen could but feel her little naughtiness well

justified. It was delightful to be there in solitude with Sir Basil, and

the sense of sympathy that grew between her and this supplanter of her

father's was strange, but not unsweet. It wasn't only that she could help

him, and that that was always a claim to which one must respond, but she

liked helping him.

On the downward way, a little tired from the rapidity of her ascent, she

often gave her hand to Sir Basil as she leaped from rock to rock, and they

smiled at each other without speaking, already like the best of friends.

That evening, as she was going down to dinner, Imogen met her mother on the

stairs. They spoke little to each other during these days. Imogen felt that

her neutrality of attitude could best be maintained by silence.

"Mrs. Potts came back," her mother said, smiling a little, and, Imogen

fancied, with the old touch of timidity that she remembered in her. "She

said that you took her on a most fearful climb."

"What foolishness, poor dear Mrs. Potts! I took her along the upper path."

"The upper path! Is there an upper path?" Mrs. Upton descended beside her

daughter. "I thought that it was the usual path that had proved too much

for her."

"I wanted them to see the view from the rock," said Imogen; "I forgot that

poor Mrs. Potts would find it too difficult a climb."

"Oh, I remember, now, the rock! That is a difficult climb," said Mrs.

Upton.

Imogen wondered if her mother guessed at why Mrs. Potts had been taken on

it. She must feel it of good augury, if she did, that her daughter should

already like Sir Basil enough to indulge in such an uncharitable freak.

Imogen felt her color rise a little as she suspected herself and her

motives revealed. It was not that she wasn't quite ready to own to a

friendship with Sir Basil; but she didn't want friendship to be confused

with condonation, and she didn't like her mother to guess that she could

use Mrs. Potts uncharitably.