Violent emotions, in highly civilized surroundings, may wonderfully be
effaced by the common effort of those who have learned how to live. Of
these there were, perhaps, not many in our little group; but the guidance
of such a past mistress of the art as Imogen's mother steered the social
craft, on this occasion, past the reefs and breakers into a tolerably
smooth sea.
With an ally as facile, despite his personal perturbations, as Sir Basil,
a friend like Mrs. Wake at hand--a friend to whom one had never to make
explanations, yet who always understood what was wanted of her,--with
a presence so propitious as the calm and unconscious Miss Bocock, the
sickening plunges of explanation and recrimination that accompany unwary
seafaring and unskilful seamanship were quite avoided in the time that
passed between Valerie's appearance at the tea-table--where she dispensed
refreshment to Mrs. Wake, Miss Bocock, and Jack only--and the meeting of
all the ship's crew at dinner.
Valerie, in that ominous interlude, even when Sir Basil appeared on the
veranda, alone, but saying that he had been for a walk with Miss Upton, who
was tired and had gone to her room to rest, even when she observed that
the Pottses had decided upon maintaining a splendid isolation in their
own chambers, did not permit the ship to turn for one moment in such a
direction. She had tea sent up to Imogen and tea sent up to the Pottses;
but no messages of any sort accompanied either perfectly appointed tray,
and when the dinner hour arrived she faced the Pottses' speechless dignity
and Imogen's _mater dolorosa_ eyelids with perfect composure. She seemed,
on meeting the Pottses, neither to ignore nor to recall.
She seemed to understand speechlessness, yet to take it lightly, as if on
their account. She talked at them, through them, with them, really, in such
a manner that they were drawn helplessly into her shuttle and woven into
the gracefully gliding pattern of social convention in spite of themselves.
In fact, she preserved appearances with such success that everyone, to each
one's surprise, was able to make an excellent dinner.
After high emotions, as after high seas, the appetite is capricious,
shrinking to the shudder of repulsion or rising to whetted keenness.
Valerie had the satisfaction of seeing that her crew, as they assured
themselves--or, rather, as she assured them--that the waters were silken
in their calm, showed the reaction from moral stress in wholesome sensuous
gratification. Even Mrs. and Mr. Potts, even Imogen, were hungry.
She herself had still too strongly upon her the qualm of imminent shipwreck
to do more than seem to join them; but it was only natural that the
captain, who alone was conscious of just how near the reefs were and of
just how threatening the horizon loomed, should lack the appetite that his
reassuring presence evoked. Jack noticed that she ate nothing, but he alone
noticed it.
It was perhaps Jack who noticed most universally at that wonderful little
dinner, where the shaded candle-light seemed to isolate them in its soft,
diffused circle of radiance and the windows, with their faintly stirring
muslin curtains, to open on a warm, mysterious ocean of darkness. The
others were too much occupied with their own particular miseries and in
their own particular reliefs to notice how the captain fared.
Mrs. Wake must, no doubt, guess that something was up, but she couldn't
in the least guess how much. She watched, but her observation, her
watchfulness, could be in no sense like his own. Miss Bocock, in a low-cut
blouse of guipure and pale-blue satin, her favorite red roses pinned on
her shoulder, her fringe freshly and crisply curled above her eyeglasses,
was the only quite unconscious presence, and so innocent was her
unconsciousness that it could not well be observant. Indeed, in one sinking
moment, she leaned forward, with unwonted kindliness, to ask the stony Mrs.
Potts if her headache was better, a question received with a sphinx-like
bow. Apart, however, from the one or two blunders of unconsciousness, Jack
saw that Miss Bocock was very useful to Valerie; more useful than himself,
on whom, he felt, her eye did not venture to rest for any length of time.
Too tragic a consciousness would rise between them if their glances too
deeply intermingled.
Miss Bocock's gaze, behind its crystal medium, was a smooth surface from
which the light balls of dialogue rebounded easily. Miss Bocock thought
that she had never talked so well upon her own topics as on this occasion,
and from the intentness of the glances turned upon her she might well have
been misled as to her effectiveness. The company seemed to thirst for every
detail as to her theory of the rise of the Mycenean civilization. Mrs.
Wake, for all her tact, was too wary, too observant, to fill so perfectly
the part of buffer-state as was Miss Bocock.
If one wanted pure amusement, with but the faintest tincture of pity to
color it, the countenances of the Pottses were worth close study. That
their silence was not for one moment allowed to become awkward, to
themselves, or to others, Jack recognized as one of Valerie's miracles that
night, and when he considered that the Pottses might not guess to whom they
owed their ease, he could hardly pity them. That their eyes should not meet
his, except for a heavy stare or two, was natural. After this meeting in
the mirage-like oasis that Valerie made bloom for them all, he knew that
for the Pottses he would be relegated to the sightless, soundless Saharas
of a burning remembrance. It was but a small part of his attention that was
spared to the consciousness that Mr. Potts was very uplifted, that Mrs.
Potts was very tense, and that Mrs. Potts's dress, as if in protest against
any form of relaxation and condonation, was very, very high and tight.
Indeed, Mrs. Potts, in her room, before the descent, had said to her
husband, in the mutual tones of their great situation, laying aside with
resolution the half-high bodice that, till then, had marked her concession
to fashionable standards, "Never, never again, in her house. Let her bare
her bosom if she will. I shall protest against her by every symbol."
Mr. Potts, with somber justice, as though he exonerated an Agrippina from
one of many crimes, had remarked that the bosom, as far as he had observed
it, had been slightly veiled; but:--"I understand those tuckers," Mrs.
Potts had replied with a withering smile, presenting her back for her
husband to hook, a marital office that usually left Mr. Potts in an
exhausted condition.
So Mrs. Potts this evening seemed at once to mourn, to protest and to
accuse, covered to her chin with a relentless black.
But, though Jack saw all this, he was not in the humor for more than a
superficial sense of amusement. With his excited sense of mirth was a
deeper sense of disaster, and the poor Pottses were at once too grotesque
and too insignificant to satisfy it.
It was upon Imogen and Sir Basil that his eye most frequently turned.
Valerie had put them together, separated from herself by the whole length
of the table; Mr. Potts was on Imogen's other hand; Miss Bocock sat between
Mr. Potts and Valerie, and Jack, Mrs. Wake and Mrs. Potts brought the
circle round to Sir Basil, a neat gradation of affinities.
Jack, in a glance, had seen that Imogen had been passionately weeping; he
could well imagine that grief. But before her pallid face and sunken eyes
he knew that his heart was hardened. Never, judged from a dispassionate
standard, had Imogen been so right, and her rightness left him indifferent.
If she had been wrong; if she had been, in some sense guilty, if her
consciousness had not been so supremely spotless, he would have been
sorrier for her. It was the woman beside him whose motives he could not
penetrate, whose action to-day had seemed to him mistaken, it was for her
that his heart ached. Imogen he seemed to survey from across a far, wide
chasm of alienation.
Sir Basil was evidently as bent on helping her as was her mother. He talked
very gaily, tossing back all Valerie's balls. He rallied Miss Bocock on
her radical tendencies, and engaged in a humorous dispute with Mrs. Wake
in defense of racing. Imogen, when he spoke, turned her eyes on him and
listened gravely. When her mother spoke, she looked down at her plate. But
once or twice Jack caught her eye, while her mother's attention was engaged
elsewhere, resting upon her with a curious, a piercing intentness. Such a
cold glitter, as of steel, was in the glance, that, instinctively, his own
turned on Valerie, as if he had felt her threatened.
This instinct of protection was oddly on the watch to-night. Under
the sense of mirth and disaster a deeper thing throbbed in him, some
inarticulate sorrow, greater than the apparent causes warranted, that
mourned with and for her. In the illumination of this intuition Valerie, he
thought, had never been so lovely as to-night. It seemed to him that her
body, with its indolence of aspect, expressed an almost superhuman courage.
She was soft and fragile and weary, leaning there in her transparent black,
her cheek in her hand, her elbow, in, its loose sleeve, resting on the
table; but she made him think of a reed: that the tempest could not break.
Her face was pale, he had never seen it so drained of its dusky rose. There
was something inexpressibly touching in the flicker of her smile on the
white, white cheek, in the innocent gaiety of the dimple placed high and
recalling Japanese suggestions, vague as the scent of sandal-wood. She,
too, had wept, as he well knew; and his heart ached, dully, as he thought
of that bitter weeping, those tears, of humility and pain. Her eyelids,
strangely discolored, were like the petals of a melancholy flower, and her
eyes were heavy and gentle.
A vague, absurdly alarming sense of presage grew upon him as his eyes went
from this face to Imogen's--so still, so cold, so unanswering, lightened,
as if from a vail of heavy cloud, by that stealthy, baleful, illuminating
glance. In Imogen's whole bearing he read renouncement, but renouncement,
in her hand, would assuredly prove a scourge for her mother's shoulders.
For the time that they must be together, she and her mother, her sense of
her own proved rightness would be relentless, as inflexible as and as
relentless as her sense of bitter wrong.
Valerie's shoulders were bared and bowed. She was ready to take it all. But
it was here, for Jack, that the deep instinct of protection centered at
last in a clear decision; it was here that he felt himself rush in with the
only solution, the only salvation. At the thought of it, that one solution,
his heart ached more sharply, but it ached for himself alone. For she must
go away; yes, that was the only escape; she must go away at once, with Sir
Basil. She had failed. She had said it to him that morning in a few broken
sentences before relinquishing the hand she grasped.
"I've done more than fail. I've wrecked things"; and she had smiled
piteously upon him and left him.
He knew of what she spoke, of the disaster that, as she had seen, finally
and irrevocably had overtaken his love for her child.
And it was true, of course. She had failed. She had wrecked things; but in
his eyes, the failure she bore, the destruction she brought, made others
dark, not her. She must accept the irony of things,--it was not on her that
its shadow rested, and she must go, back to her own place, back to her own
serene, if saddened, sunlight, where she could breathe again and be safe
from scourgings. Thank heaven for Sir Basil, was Jack's thought, over that
sharpened ache. And it was with this thought that, for Jack, came the first
sinister whisper, the whisper that, as suddenly as the hiss of a viper
trodden upon in the grass, warned him of the fulfilment, clear, startling,
unimaginable, of all dim presages.
He always remembered, ludicrously, that they had reached the sweet when the
whisper came, and with his recollection of its import there mingled for him
always the incongruous association of sliced peaches and iced cream. He had
just helped himself to this dish when, raising his eyes, he saw Sir Basil
looking at Imogen.
It was, apparently, a calm, a thoughtful look, and as Imogen's eyes were
downcast to her fruit and cream, which she was eating with much appetite,
she did not then meet it. But it was a look a little off guard;--his
perception of that was the first low sibilant that reached him;--it was a
look full of gentle solicitude, full of brooding, absorbed intentness; and
presently, when Imogen, as if aware of it, glanced up and met it, Sir Basil
deeply flushed and turned his eyes away.
This passage was a small enough cause to make one suddenly grow very
chilly; Jack tried to tell himself that, as he mechanically went on eating.
Perhaps Imogen had confided in Sir Basil; perhaps he agreed with her, was
sorry, sympathetic, and embarrassed by a sympathy that set him against the
woman he loved; perhaps he already felt a protecting, paternal affection
for Imogen, just as he himself, in the absurd inversions of their
situation, felt a protecting filial affection for Valerie. But at that
thought--as if the weak links of his chain of possibilities had snapped and
left him at the verge of a chasm, a sudden echo in himself revealed depths
of disastrous analogy. It was revelation that came to Jack, rather than
self-revelation; the instinct that flamed up in him at this moment was like
a torch in a twilit cavern. He might have seen the looming shapes fairly
well without it, but, by its illumination, every uncertainty started out
into vivid light and dark. The fact that his own feeling was so far other
than filial did not detain him. His light was not turned upon himself; of
himself he only knew, in that dazzling moment, that he was armed as her
knight, armed for her battle as a son could not have been; it was upon Sir
Basil, upon Imogen, that the torch-light rested.
He looked presently from them to Valerie. Did she know at all what was her
peril? Had she seen at all what threatened her? Her face told him nothing.
She was talking to Miss Bocock, and her serenity, as of mellow moonlight,
cooled and calmed him a little so that he could wonder whether the peril
was very imminent. Even if the unbelievable had happened;--even if Imogen
had ensnared Sir Basil--Jack's thoughts, in dealing with poor Imogen,
passed in their ruthlessness beyond the facts--even if she had ensnared
him, surely, surely, she could not keep him. The glamour would pass from
him. He would be the first to fight clear of it were he fully aware of what
it signified. For Imogen knew,--the torch-light had revealed that to
Jack,--Imogen knew, he and Imogen, alone, knew. Sir Basil didn't and
Valerie didn't. Single-handed he might save them both. Save them both from
Imogen.
To this strange landing-place had his long voyage, away from old ports, old
landmarks, brought him; and on its rocks he stepped to-night, bound on a
perilous quest in an unknown country. It seemed almost like the coast of
another planet, so desolate, so lonely. But beyond the frowning headlines
he imagined that he would find, far inland, quiet green stretches where he
would rest, and think of her. The landing was bathed in a light sadder, but
sweeter far than the sunlight of other countries. Here he was to fight, not
for himself, but for her.
The first move of strategy was made directly after dinner. He asked Imogen
to come out and see the moonlight with him.
A word to the wise was a word to Mrs. Wake, who safely cornered Miss Bocock
and the Pottses over a game of cards. Jack saw Valerie and Sir Basil
established on the veranda, and then led Imogen away, drew her from her
quarry, along the winding path in the woods.