Imogen always looked back to her moonlight walk with Jack as one of the few
occurrences in her life that, at the time, she had not understood. She
understood well enough afterward, with retrospective vexation for her so
ludicrous, yet, after all, so natural innocence. At the time she hadn't
even seen that Jack had jockeyed her out of a communing with Sir Basil.
She had actually thought that Jack might have some word of penitence or
exculpation to say to her after his behavior that morning. As a matter of
fact she could easily have forgiven him had his lack of sympathy been for
her instruments only and not rather for her project. Really, except for
the triumph it had seemed to give to her mother, the humiliation that it
had seemed, vicariously, to inflict upon herself, she hadn't been able to
defend herself from a queer sense of pleasure in witnessing the ejection of
the Pottses. With the tension that had come into the scene they had been in
the way; she, as keenly as Jack, had felt the sense of unfitness, though
she had been willing to endure it, and as keenly as Jack she had felt Mr.
Potts as insufferably presuming. She had been glad that his presumption
should wreak punishment upon her mother, but glad, too, that when the
weapon had served its purpose, it should be removed.
So her feelings toward Jack, as he led her down the woodland path, where,
not so many days ago--but how far off they seemed--she had led Sir Basil,
were not so bitter as they might have been. Bitterness was in abeyance. She
waited to hear what he might have to say for himself and about her--about
this new disaster that had befallen her, and with the thought of the
retribution that she held, almost, within her grasp, came something of a
softening to sadness and regret over Jack. In spite of that glorious moment
of the pine woods, with its wide vistas into the future, some torn fiber of
her heart would go on aching when she thought of Jack and his lost love;
and when he led her away among the woods, thick with trembling lights and
shadows, she really, for a little while, expected to hear him say that,
sympathize as he might with her mother, reprobate as he might her own
attitude toward her, there were needs in him deeper than sympathies or
blame; she almost expected him to tell her that, above all, he loved her
and couldn't get on without her. Else why had he asked her to come and see
the moonlight in the woods?
A vagueness hovered for her over her own attitude in case of such an
avowal, a vagueness connected with the veil that still hung between her
unavowed lover and herself, and even as she walked away with Jack she felt
a mingled pang of eagerness for what he might have to say to her and of
anxiety for what, more than his petition on her behalf, Sir Basil might be
drawn into saying to her mother on the veranda. She didn't crudely tell
herself that she would not quite abandon Jack until the veil were drawn
aside and triumph securely attained; she only saw herself, as far as she
saw herself at all, as pausing between two choices, pausing to weigh which
was the greater of the appealing needs and which the deeper of the
proffered loves. She knew that the balance inclined to Sir Basil's side,
but she saw herself, for this evening, sadly listening, but withholding, in
its full definiteness, the sad rejection of Jack's tardy appeal.
With this background of interpretation it was, therefore, with a growing
perplexity that she heard Jack, beside her, or a little before, so that
he might hold back the dewy branches from her way, talk on persistently,
fluently, cheerfully, in just the same manner, with the same alert voice
and pleasant, though watchful, eye, that he had talked at dinner. Her
mother might have been walking beside them for all the difference there
was. Jack, the shy, the abrupt, the often awkward, seemed infected with her
mother's social skill. The moonlit woods were as much a mere background for
maneuvers as the candle-lit dinner-table had been. Not a word of the
morning's disaster; not a word of sympathy or inquiry; not a word of
self-defence or self-exposition; not even a word of expostulation or
reproach.
As for entreaty, tenderness, the drawing near once more, the drop to loving
need after the climax of alienation, she saw, by degrees, how illusory
had been any such imagining; she saw at last, with a sharpness that
queerly chilled her blood, that Jack was abdicating the lover's rôle more
decisively than even before. Verbal definiteness left hazes of possibility
compared to this dreadfully competent reticence. It was more than evasion,
more than reticence, more than abdication that she felt in Jack; it was a
deep hostility, it was the steady burning of that flame that she had seen
in his eye that morning when she had told her mother that she was cruel
and shallow and selfish. This was an enemy who walked beside her and,
after perplexity, after the folly of soft imaginings, the folly of having
allowed her heart to yearn over him a little, and, perhaps, over herself,
indignation rushed upon her, and humiliation, and then the passionate
longing for vengeance.
He thought himself very cool and competent, this skilful Jack, leading
her down in the illumined, dewy woods, talking on and on, talking--the
fool--for so, with a bitter smile, her inner commentary dubbed him--of
Manet, of Monet, of Whistler, of the decomposition of light, the vibration
of color.
From the heat of fierce anger Imogen reached a contemptuous coolness. She
made no attempt to stay his volubility; she answered, quietly, accurately,
with chill interest, all he said. They might really have met for the first
time at dinner that night, were it not that Jack's competence was a little
feverish, were it not that her own courtesy was a little edged. But the
swing from tender sadness to perplexity, to fury, to contempt, was so
violent that not until they turned to retrace their steps did a very
pertinent question begin to make itself felt. It made itself felt with the
sudden leap to fear of that underlying anxiety as to what was happening on
the veranda, and the fear lit the question with a lurid, though, as yet,
not a revealing flicker. For why had he done it? That was what she asked
herself as they faced the moonlight and saw the woods all dark on a
background of mystic gold. What fatuous complacency had made him take so
much trouble just to show her how little he cared for what she might be
feeling, for what he had himself once felt?
Imogen pondered, striding before him with her long, light step, urged now
by the inner pressure of fear as to the exchange that her absence had made
possible between her mother and Sir Basil. It had been foolish of her
to leave him for so long, exposed and helpless. Instinctively her step
hastened as she went and, Jack following closely, they almost ran at last,
silent and breathing quickly. Imogen had, indeed, the uncanny sensation of
being pursued, tracked, kept in sight by her follower. From the last thin
screen of branches she emerged, finally, into the grassy clearing.
There was a flicker of white on the veranda. In the shadow of the creepers
stood two figures, clasping hands. Her mother and Sir Basil.
Fear beat suddenly, suffocatingly, in Imogen's throat. A tide of
humiliation, like the towering of a gigantic wave above her head, seemed to
rise and encompass her round about. She had counted too soon upon gladness,
upon vengeance. Everything was stripped from her, if--if Jack and her
mother had succeeded. With lightning-like rapidity her mind grasped its
suspicion. She looked back at Jack. His eyes, too, were fixed on the
veranda, and suspicion was struck to certainty by what she read in them. He
was tense; he was white; he was triumphant. Too soon triumphant! In another
moment the imminence of her terror passed by. The clasp was not that of a
plighting. It was over; it denoted some lesser compact, one that meant,
perhaps, success for her almost forgotten hope. But in Jack's eye she had
read what was her danger.
Imogen paused but for a moment to draw the breath of a mingled relief
and realization. Her knowledge was the only weapon left in her hand, and
strength, safety, the mere semblance of dignity, lay in its concealment. If
he guessed that Sir Basil needed guarding, he should never guess that she
did. Already her headlong speed might have jeopardized her secret.
"What a pretty setting for our elderly lovers, isn't it?" she said.
That her voice should slightly tremble was only natural; he must know that
even from full unconsciousness such a speech must be for her a forced and
painful one.
Jack looked her full in the eye, as steadily as she looked at him.
"Isn't it?" he said.