Valerie, on sinking into the low wicker chair, and drawing her chuddah
about her shoulders, drawing it closely, although the evening was not cool
had expected to find Jack, or Mrs. Wake, or Miss Bocock presently beside
her.
She had watched, as they wandered, all of them, into the drawing-room, the
hovering, long since familiar to her, of Sir Basil. She had seen that his
eye was as much on Imogen as on herself. She had seen Imogen's eye meet his
with a deep insistence. What it commanded, this eye, Valerie did not know,
but she had grown accustomed to seeing such glances obeyed and she expected
to watch, presently, Imogen's and Sir Basil's departure into the moonlit
woods.
It was, therefore, with surprise that she looked up to see Sir Basil's form
darken against the sky. He asked if he might smoke his cigar beside her,
and the intelligent smile he knew so well rested upon him as he took the
chair next hers.
In the slight pause that followed, both were thinking that, since their
parting in England they had really been very seldom alone together, and in
Sir Basil's mind was a wonder, very disquieting, as to what, really, had
been the understanding under the parting.
He was well aware that any vagueness as to understanding had been owing
entirely to Valerie, well aware that had she not always kept about them the
atmosphere of sunny frankness and gay friendship, he would without doubt
have entangled himself and her in the complications of an avowed devotion,
and that long before her husband's death. For how she had charmed him, this
gay, this deep-hearted friend, descending suddenly on his monotonous life
with a flutter of wings, a flash of color, a liquid pulse of song, like
some strange, bright bird. Charm had grown to affection and to trustful
need, and then to the restlessness and pain and sadness of his hidden
passion. He would have spoken, he knew it very well, were it not that she
had never given him the faintest chance to speak, the faintest excuse for
speaking. She had kept him from any avowal so completely that he might
well, now, wonder if his self-control had not been owing far more to the
intuition of hopelessness than to mere submission. Could she have kept him
so silent, had she been the least little bit in love with him? He had, of
course, been tremendously in love with her--it was bewildering to use the
past tense, indeed--and she, of course, clever creature that she was, must
have known it; but hadn't he been very fatuous in imagining that beneath
her fond, playful friendship lay the possibility of a deeper response?
Since seeing her again, in her effaced, maternal rôle, he had realized that
she was more middle-aged than he had ever thought her, and since coming
to Vermont there had been a new emphasis in this cool, gray quality that
removed her the more from associations with youth and passion. So was he
brought, by the dizzy turn of events, to hoping that loyalty to his own
past love was, for him, the only question, since loyalty to her, in that
respect, had never been expected of him.
Yet, as he took his place beside her and looked at her sitting there in the
golden light, wrapped round in white, very wan and pale, despite her smile,
he felt the strangest, twisted pang of divided desire.
She was wan and she was pale, but she was not cool, she was not gray; he
felt in her, as strongly as in far-off days, the warmth and fragrance, and
knew that it was Imogen who had so cast her into a shadow. Her image had
grown dim on that very first time of seeing Imogen standing as Antigone in
the rapt, hushed theater. That dawn had culminated to-day in the
over-mastering, all-revealing burst of noon, and from its radiance the past
had been hardly visible except as shadow. But now he sat in the moonlight,
the past personified in the quiet presence beside him, and the memory of
noonday itself became mirage-like and uncertain. He almost felt as if he
had been having a wild dream, and that Valerie's glance was the awakening
from it.
To think of Imogen's filial grief and of his promise to her,--a promise
deeply recalled to him by the message of her tear-worn eyes,--to steady his
mind to the task of friendly helpfulness, was to put aside the accompanying
memory of eyes, lips, gold hair on a background of flowering laurel,
was to re-enter, through sane, kind altruism, his old, normal state of
consciousness, and to shut the door on something very sweet and wonderful,
to shut the door--in Imogen's phraseology--on his soul, but, in doing that,
to be loyal to the older hope.
Perhaps, he reflected, looking at Valerie through the silvery circles of
smoke, it depended on her as to whether the door should remain shut on
all the high visions of the last weeks. After all, it had always depended
on her, tremendously, as to where he should find himself. Certainly he
couldn't regard her as the antithesis of soul, though he didn't associate
her with its radiant demonstration, yet he felt that, if she so willed it,
she could lock the door on visions and keep him sanely, safely, sweetly
beside her for the future. If she really did care. Poor Sir Basil, sitting
there in his faint cloud of smoke, while clouds of doubt and perplexity--as
impalpable drifted through his mind, really couldn't for the life of him
have told which solution he most hoped for.
He plunged from the rather humiliating pause of self-contemplation into
the more congenial field of action, with a last swift thought--most
illuminating of all--as he plunged--that in the results of action he would
find his test. If she cared for him--really cared--she would grant his
request; and if she cared, why then, not only reawakened loyalty, but some
very deep acquiescence in his own nature, would keep him beside her, and
to-night would see them as affianced lovers. It would be a pity to have let
one's new-found soul go; but, after all, it was so very new that the pang
of parting would soon be over; that was a good point about middle-age, one
soon got over pangs, soon forgot visions.
"I want to talk to you about something. I'm going to ask you to be kinder
to me, even, than you've ever been,"--so he approached the subject, while
the mingled peace and bitterness of the last thoughts lingered with him.
"I'm going to ask you to let me be very indiscreet, very intimate. It's
about something very personal."
Valerie no longer smiled, but she looked even more gentle and even more
intelligent. "I will be as kind as you can possibly want me to be," she
answered.
"It's about--about Miss Upton."
"About Imogen? Don't you call her Imogen yet? You must."
"I will. I've just begun"; and with this avowal Sir Basil turned away his
eyes for a moment, and even in the moonlight showed his flush. "I had a
long talk with her this afternoon."
"Yes. I supposed that you had. You may be perfectly frank with me," said
Valerie, her eyes on his averted face.
"She was most dreadfully cut up, you know. She came rushing up to the pine
woods--I was smoking there--rushing up as if she were running for her
life--crying,--exhausted,--in a dreadful state."
"Yes. I know."
"Yes, of course you do. What don't you know and what don't you understand,"
said Sir Basil gratefully, his eyes coming back to hers. "So I needn't go
over it all--what she feels about it. I realize very well that you feel for
her as much as I do."
"Oh, yes, you must realize that," said Valerie, a little faintly.
"She was in such a state that one simply had to try to comfort her,--if one
could,--and we have come to be such friends;--so she told me everything."
"Yes. Of course."
"Well that's just it. What I want to ask you is--can't you, for her sake,
quite apart from your own feelings--give in about it?" So spoke Sir Basil,
sitting in the moonlight, the spark of his cigar waning as, in the long
pause that followed, he held it, forgotten, in an expectant, arrested
hand. Her voice had helped and followed him with such gentleness, such
understanding that, though the pause grew, he hardly thought that it needed
the added, "I do beg it of you," that he brought out presently to make her
acquiescence more sure; and his shock of disappointment was sharpened by
surprise to a quick displeasure when, her eyes passing from his face and
resting for long on the shadowy woods, she said in a deadened voice, a
voice strangely lacking in feeling:--"I can't."
He couldn't conceal the disappointment nor, quite, the displeasure. "You
can't? Really you can't?--Forgive me, but don't you think she's a right to
have it written, her father's life, you know, if she feels so deeply about
it?"
"I can't. I will never give my consent," Valerie repeated.
"But, she's breaking her heart over it," Sir Basil deeply protested; and
before the quality of the protestation she paused again, as though to give
herself time to hide something.
"I know that it is hard for her," was all she said at last.
Protestation gave way to wonder, deep and sad. "And for her sake--for _my_
sake, let me put it--you can't let bygones be bygones?--You can't give her
her heart's desire?--My dear friend, it's such a little thing."
"I know that. But it's for his sake that I can't," said Valerie.
Sir Basil, at this, was silent, for a long time. Perplexity mingled with
his displeasure, and the pain of failure, the strangely complex pain.
She did not care for him enough; and she was wrong, and she was fantastic
in her wrongness. For his sake?--the dead husband, whom, after all, she had
abandoned and made unhappy?--Imogen's words came crowding upon him like
a host of warning angel visages. She actually told him that this cruel
thwarting of her child was for the sake of the child's father?
It was strange and pitiful that a woman so sweet, so lovely, should so
grotesquely deceive herself as to her motives for refusing to see bare
justice done.
"May I ask why for him?--I don't understand," he said.
Valerie now turned her eyes once more on his face. With his words, with the
tone, courteous yet cold, in which they were spoken, she recognized a
reached landmark. For a long time she had caught glimpses of it, ominously
glimmering ahead of her, through the sunny mists of hope, across the wide
stretches of trust. And here it was at last, but so suddenly, for all her
presages, that she almost lost her breath for a moment in looking at it and
what it marked. Here, unless she grasped, paths might part. Here, unless
she pleaded, something might be slain. Here, above all, something might
turn its back on her for ever, unless she were disloyal to her own strange
trust.
A good many things had been happening to Valerie of late, but this was
really the worst, and as she looked at the landmark it grew to be the
headstone of a grave, and she saw that under it might lie her youth.
"I don't believe that you could understand, ever," she said at last in an
unaltered voice, a voice, to her own consciousness, like the wrapping of
a shroud about her. "It's only I who could feel it, so deeply as to go so
far. All that I can say to you is this; my husband was a mediocre man, and
a pretentious one. I once loved him. I was always sorry for him. I must
guard him now. I cannot have him exposed. I cannot have his mediocrity and
pretentiousness displayed to the people there are in the world who would
see him as he was, and whose opinion counts."
She knew, as she said it, as she folded the shroud, that he would not be
one of those. Her husband's pretentiousness and mediocrity would not be
apparent to the ingenuous and uncomplex mind beside her. She knew that mind
too well and had watched it, of late, receiving with wondering admiration
from her daughter's lips, echoes of her husband's fatuities. She loved him
for his incapacity to see sad and ugly and foolish facts as she saw them.
She loved his manliness and his childishness. As she had guarded the other,
once loved, man from revealment she would have guarded this one from ironic
and complex visions. But the lack that endeared him to her might lose him
to her. He could never see as she saw and her fidelity to her own light
could in his eyes be but perversity. Besides, she could guess at the
interpretations that loomed in his mind; could guess at what Imogen had
told him; it hardly needed his next words to let her know.
"But was he so mediocre, so pretentious?" he suggested, with the touch
of timidity that comes from a deeper hostility than one can openly
avow.--"Aren't you a little over-critical--through being disappointed in
him--personally? Can you be so sure of your own verdict as all that? Other
people, who loved him--who always loved him I mean--are sure the other way
round," said Sir Basil.
To prove herself faithful, not perverse, whom must she show to him as
unfaithful in very ardor for rightness? In the midst of all the wrenching
of her hidden passion came a pang of maternal pity. Imogen's figure,
bereaved of her father, of her lover, desolate, amazed, rose before her
and, behind it, the hovering, retributory gaze of her husband.
This, then, was what she must pay for having failed, for having wrecked.
The money that she handed out must be her love, her deep love, for this
lover of her fading years, and she knew that she paid the price, for
everything paid the price, above all, for her right to her own complex
fidelity, when she said:
"I am quite sure of my own verdict. I take all the responsibility. I think
other people wrong. And you must think me wrong, if it looks to you like
that."
"But, it's almost impossible for me to think you wrong," said Sir Basil,
feeling that a chill far frostier than the seeming situation warranted had
crept upon them. "Even if you are--why we all are, of course, most of the
time, I suppose. It's only--it's only that I can't see clear. That you
should be so sure of an opinion, a mere opinion, when it hurts someone
else, so abominably;--it's there I don't seem to _see_ you, you know."
"Can't you trust me?" Valerie asked. It was her last chance, her last throw
of the dice. She knew that her heart was suffocating her, with its heavy
throbbing, but to Sir Basil's ear her voice was still the deadened, the
unchanged voice. "Can't you believe in my sincerity when I give you my
reasons? Can't you, knowing me as you do, for so long, believe that I am
more likely to be right, in my judgment of my husband, than--other people?"
Her eyes, dark and deep in the moonlight, were steadily upon him. And now,
probed to the depths, he, too, was conscious of a parting of the ways It
was a choice of loyalties, and he remembered those other eyes, sunlit,
limpid, uplifted, that lifted him, too, with their heavenly, upward gaze.
He stammered; he grew very red; but he, too, was faithful to his own light.
"Of course I know, my dear friend, that you are sincere. But, as to your
being right;--in these things, one can't help seeing crookedly, sometimes,
when personal dislike has entered into a,--a near relationship. One really
can hardly help it, can one?--" he almost pleaded.
Valerie's eyes rested deeply and darkly upon him and, as they rested, he
felt, strangely and irresistibly, that they let him go. Let him go to sink
or to soar--that depended on which vision were the truer.
He knew that after his flush he had become very pale. His cigar had gone
out;--he looked at it with a nervous gesture. The moonlight was cold
and Valerie had turned away her eyes. But as she suddenly rose, he saw,
glancing from his dismal survey of the dead cigar, that she was smiling
again. It was a smile that healed even while it made things hazy to him.
Nothing was hazy to her, he was very sure of that; but she would make
everything as easy as possible to him--even the pain of finding her so
wrong, even the pain of seeing that she didn't care enough, the complex
pain of being set free to seize the new happiness--he was surer of that
than ever.
He, too, got up, grateful, troubled, but warm once more.
The moonlight was bright and golden, and the shadows of the vines that
stirred against the sky wavered all over her as she stood before him. So
strangely did the light and shade move upon her, that it seemed as if she
glided through the ripples of some liquid, mysterious element, not air nor
light nor water, but a magical mingling of the three. He had just time to
feel, vaguely, for everything was blurred, this sense of strangeness and of
sweetness, too, when she gave him her hand.
"Friends, as ever, all the same--are we not?" she said.
Sir Basil, knowing that if he glided it was only because she took him with
her, grasped it tightly, the warm, tangible comfort. "Well _rather_!" he
said with school-boy emphasis.
Be she as wrong as she would, dear creature of light, of shade, of mystery,
it was indeed "well _rather_." Never had he known how much till now.
Holding the hand, he wondered, gazing at her, how much such a friendship,
new yet old, counted for. In revealing it so fully, she had set wide the
door, she had set him free to claim his soul; yet so wonderfully did
they glide that no gross thought of escape touched him for a moment, so
beautifully did she smile that he seemed rather to be gaining something
than to be giving something up.