Even Valerie couldn't dispel the encompassing cloud of gloom at dinner. One
couldn't do much in such a fog but drift with it. And Jack saw that she was
fit for no more decisive action.
Imogen, pale, and almost altogether silent, said that she was very tired,
and went up-stairs early. Rose and Eddy, in a shaded corner of the
drawing-room, engaged in a long altercation. The others talked, in
desultory fashion, till bedtime. No one seemed fit for more than drifting.
It was hardly eleven when Jack was left alone with Mrs. Upton.
"You are tired, too," he said to her; "dreadfully tired. I mustn't ask for
our talk."
"I should like a little stroll in the moonlight." Valerie, at the open
window, was looking out. "In a night or two it will be too late for us to
see. We'll have our walk and our talk, Jack."
She rang for her white chuddah, told the maid to put out the lamps, and
that she and Mr. Pennington would shut the house when they came in. From
the darkened house they stepped into the warm, pale night. They went in
silence over the lawn and, with no sense of choice, took the mossy path
that led to the rustic bench where they had met that afternoon.
It was not until they were lost in the obscurity of the woods that Valerie
said, very quietly: "Do you remember our talk, Jack, on that evening in New
York, after the tableaux?"
He had followed along the path just behind her; but now he came to her side
so that he could see her shadowy face. "Yes;--the evening in which we saw
that Imogen and Sir Basil were going to be friends."
"And the evening," said Valerie, "when you showed me plainly, at last, that
because I seemed gold to you, Imogen's blue had turned to green."
"Yes;--I remember."
"It has faded further and further away, her blue, hasn't it?"
"Yes," he confessed.
"So that you are hardly friends, Jack?"
He paused for a moment, and then completed his confession:--"We are not
friends."
Valerie stood still, breathing as if with a little difficulty after the
gradual ascent. The tall trees about them were dark and full of mystery on
the pale mysterious sky. Through the branches they could see the glint of
the moon's diminished disk.
"That is terrible, you know," said Valerie, after they had stood in silence
for some moments.
"I know it."
"For both of you."
"Worse for me, because I cared more, really cared more."
"No, worse for her, for it is you who have judged and rejected her."
"She thinks that it is she who has judged and rejected me."
"She tries to think it; she does not always succeed. It has been bitter, it
has been cruel for her."
"Oh, yes, bitter and cruel," he assented.
"Don't try to minimize her pain, Jack."
"You feel that I can't care, much?"
"It is horrible for me to feel it. Think of her when I came, so secure, so
calm, so surrounded by love and appreciation. And now"--Valerie walked on,
as if urged to motion by the controlled force of her own insistence. Was it
an appeal to him that Imogen, dispossessed of the new love, might find
again the old love opening to her? He clung to the hope, though with a
sickening suspicion of its folly.
"By my coming, I have robbed her of everything," Valerie was saying,
walking swiftly up the path and breathing as if with that slight
difficulty--the sound of her breaths affected him with an almost
intolerable sense of expectancy. "She isn't secure;--she isn't calm. She is
warped;--her faiths are warped. Her friends are changed to her. She has
lost you. It's as if I had shattered her life."
"Everything that wasn't real you have shattered."
The rustic bench was reached and they paused there, though with no eyes for
the shaft of mystic distance that opened before them. Jack's eyes were on
her and he was conscious of a rising insistence in himself that matched and
opposed her own.
"But you must be sorry for her pain," said Valerie, and now, with eyes
almost stern in their demand, she gazed at him;--"you must be sorry that
she has had to lose so much. And you would be glad, would you not, to think
that real things, a new life, were to come to her?"
He understood; even before the words, his fear, his presage, leaped forward
to this crashing together of all his hopes. And it seemed to him that a
flame passed through him, shriveling in its ardent wrath all trite
reticences and decorums.
"No; no, I should not be glad," he answered. His voice was violent; the
eyes he fixed on her were violent. His words struck Imogen out of his life
for ever.
"Why are you so cruel?" she faltered.
"I am cruel for _you_. I know what you want to do. You are going to give
her _your_ life."
Quick as a flash she answered--it was like a rapier parrying his
stroke:--"Give?--what have I to do with it, if it comes to her?"
"Everything! Everything!" he cried.
"Nothing. You are mistaken."
"Ah,--you could keep it, you could keep it--if you tried." And now his eyes
pleaded--pleaded with her, for her own life's sake, to keep what was hers.
"You have only to _show_ her to him, as you did to me."
"You think--I could do that!--to my child!"--Through the darkness her white
face looked a wild reproach at him.
He seized her hands:--"It's to do her no wrong!--It's only to be true,
consciously, to him, as you were true, unconsciously, to me. It's only, not
to let her rob you--not to let her rob him."
"Jack," she breathed heavily, "these are things that cannot be said."
"They must--they must--now, between us. I have my right. I've cared
enough--to do anything, so that she should not rob you!" Jack groaned.
"She has not robbed me. It left me;--it went to her;--I saw it all. Even if
I had been base enough, even if I had tried to keep it by showing her to
him--as you say so horribly,--even then I should not have kept it. He would
not have seen. Don't you understand;--he is not that sort of man. She will
always be blue to him, and I will always be gold--though perhaps, now, a
little tarnished. That's what is so beautiful in him--and so stupid. He
doesn't see colors, as you and I do, Jack. That's what makes me sure that
this is the happiest of fortunes for them both."
He had held her hands, gazing at her downcast face, its strength speaking
from the shadow, its pain hidden from him, and now, before her resolution
and her gentleness, he bent his head upon the hands he held. "Oh, but _you,
you, you_!--It's _you_ whose life is shattered!" broke from him with a sob.
For a long while she stood silent above him, her hands enfolding his, as
though she comforted his grief. He found himself at length kissing the
gentle hands, with tears, and then, caressing his bent head with a light
touch, she said: "Don't you see that the time has come for me to accept
shatterings as in the order of things, dear Jack?--My mistake has been to
believe that life can begin over again. It can't. One uses it up--merely by
waiting. I've been an incurable girl till now;--and now, I've crashed from
girlhood to middle-age in a week! It's been a crash, of course; the sort of
crash one never mends of; but after to-day, after you sent me off with him,
Jack, and I allowed myself, in spite of all my dread, my pride, my
relinquishment, just one flicker of girlish hope,--after all this, I think
that I must put on caps to show that I am really old at last."
He lifted his head and looked at her. Her face was lovely, with the silver
disk of the moon above it and, about it, the mystery and sadness of the
tranquil woods. So lovely, so young, with almost the trembling touch of a
tender mockery, like the trembling of moonlit water, upon it. And all that
he found to say at last was:--"What a fool he is."
She really smiled then, though tears sprang to her eyes with her
comprehension of all that the helpless, boyish words struggled to subdue.
"Thanks for that, dear Jack,--and for all the other mistakes," she said.
There seemed nothing more to say, no questions to ask, or to answer. He
must accept from her that her plight was irrevocable. It was as if he had
seen a great stone rolled over the quivering, springing, shining fountain,
sealing it, stilling it for ever. And, for his part, her word covered all.
His "mistakes" needed no further revealing.
They had turned and, in silence, were moving down the path again, when they
heard, suddenly, the sound of light, swift footsteps approaching them. They
paused, exchanging a glance of wonder; and Jack thought that he saw fear in
Valerie's eyes. The day, already, had held overmuch of endurance for her,
and it was not yet ended. In another moment, tall and illumined, Imogen
appeared before them in the path.
Jack knew, in thinking it over afterward, that Imogen at her most baleful
had been Imogen at her most beautiful. She had looked, as she emerged from
shadow into light, like a virgin saint bent on some wild errand through the
night, an errand brought to a proud pause, in which was no fear and no
hesitancy, as her path was crossed by the spirits of an evil world. That
was really just what she looked like, standing there before them, bathed in
light, her eyes profound and stern, her hair crowning her with a glory of
transmuted gold, her head uplifted with a high, unfaltering purpose. That
the shock of finding them there before her was great, one saw at once; and
one could gage the strength of her purpose from her instantaneous
surmounting of the shock.
And it was strange, in looking back, to remember how the time of colorless
light and colorless shadow had seemed to divest them all of daily
conventions and daily seemings. They might have been three disembodied
souls met there in the moonlit woods and speaking the direct, unimpeded
language of souls, for whom all concealments are useless.
"Oh--it is _you_," was what Imogen said; much as the virgin saint might
have greeted the familiar demons who opposed her quest. _You_, meant both
of them. She put them together into one category of evil, saw them as one
in their enmity to her and to good. And she seemed to accept them as very
much what a saint might expect to find on such a nocturnal errand.
Involuntarily Valerie had fallen back, and she had put her hand on Jack's
shoulder in confusion more than in fear. Yet, feeling a menace in the
white, shining presence, her voice faltered as she asked: "Imogen, what are
you doing here?"
And it was at this point that Imogen reached, really, her own culmination.
Whatever shame, whatever hesitation, whatever impulsion to deceive when
deception was so easy, she may have felt; to lie, when a lie would be so
easily convincing, she rejected and triumphed over. Jack knew from her
uplifted look that the moment would count with her always as one of her
great ones one of the moments in which--as she had used to say to him
sometimes in the days that were gone forever--one knew that one had "beat
down Satan under one's feet."
"You have no right to ask me that," she said, "but I choose to answer you.
I have come here to meet Sir Basil."
"Meet him?" It was in pure bewilderment that Valerie questioned,
helplessly, without reproach.
"Meet him. Yes. What have you to say to it?"
"But why meet him?--Why now?" The wonder on Valerie's face had broken to
almost merriment. "Did he ask you to?--Really, really, he oughtn't to.
Really, my child, I can't have you meeting Sir Basil in the woods at
midnight."
"You can't have me meeting him in the woods at midnight?" Imogen repeated,
an ominous cadence, holding her head high and taking long breaths. "You say
that, dare say it, when you well know that I can meet him nowhere else and
in no other way. It was _I_ who asked him to meet me here and it is here,
confronted with you, if you so choose; it is here, before you and under
God's stars, that I shall know the truth from him. I am not ashamed; I am
proud to say it;--I love him. And though you scheme, and stoop and strive
to take him from me--you, with Jack to help you--Jack to lie for you--as he
did this morning,--I know, I know in my heart and soul that he loves me,
that he is mine."
"Jack!--Jack!" Valerie cried. She caught him back, for he started forward
to seize, to gag her daughter; "Jack--remember, remember!--She doesn't
understand!"
"Oh, he may strike me if he wills." Imogen had stood quite still, not
flinching.
"I don't want to strike you--you--you idiot!"--Jack was gasping. "I want to
force you to your knees, before your mother--who loves you--as no one else
who knows you will ever love you!" And, helplessly, his old words, so
trite, so inadequate, came back to him. "You self-centered, you
self-righteous, you cold-hearted girl!"
Valerie still held his arm with both hands, leaning upon him.
"Imogen," she said, speaking quickly, "you needn't meet Sir Basil in this
way;--there is nothing to prevent you from seeing him where and when you
will. You are right in believing that he loves you. He asked me this
morning for your hand. And I gave him my consent."
From a virgin saint Imogen, as if with the wave of a wand, saw herself
turned into a rather foolish genie, so transformed and then, ever so
swiftly, run into a bottle;--it was surely the graceful seal firmly affixed
thereto when she heard these words of conformity to the traditions of
dignified betrothal. And for once in her life, so bottled and so sealed,
she looked, as if through the magic crystal of her mother's words,
absolutely, helplessly foolish. It is difficult for a genie in a bottle to
look contrite or stricken with anything deeper than astonishment; nor is it
practicable in such a situation to fall upon one's knees,--if a genie were
to feel such an impulse of self-abasement. It was perhaps a comfort to all
concerned, including a new-comer, that Imogen should be reduced to the
silence of sheer stupefaction; and as Sir Basil appeared among them it was
not at him, after her first wide glance, that she looked, but, still as if
through the crystal bottle, at her mother, and the look was, at all events,
a confession of utter inadequacy to deal with the situation in which she
found herself.
It was Valerie, once more, who steered them all past the giddy whirlpool.
Jack, beside her, his heart and brain turning in dizzy circles, marveled at
her steadiness of eye, her clearness of voice. He would have liked to lean
against a tree and get his breath; but this delicate creature, rising from
her rack, could move forward to her place beside the helm, and smile!
"Sir Basil," she said, and she put out her hand to him so mildly that Sir
Basil may well have thought his rather uncomfortable _rendezvous_ redeemed
into happiest convention, "here we all are waiting for you, and here we are
going to leave you, you and Imogen, to take a walk and to say some of all
the things you will have to say to each other. Give me your hand, Imogen.
There, dear friend, I think that it is yours, and I trust her life to you
with, my blessing. Now take your walk, I will wait for you, as late as you
like, in the drawing-room."
So was the bottled genie released, so did it resume once more the figure of
a girl, hardly humbled, yet, it must be granted, deeply confused. In
perfect silence Imogen walked away beside her suitor, and it may be said
that she never told him of the little episode that had preceded his
arrival. Jack and Valerie went slowly on toward the house. Now that she had
grasped the helm through the whirlpool he almost expected that she would
fall upon the deck. But, silently, she walked beside him, not taking his
arm, wrapped closely in her shawl, and, once more inside the dark
drawing-room, she proceeded to light the candles on the mantel-piece,
saying that she would wait there until the others came in, smiling very
faintly as she added:--"That everything may be done properly and in order."
Jack walked up and down the room, his hands deeply thrust into the pockets
of his dining-jacket.
"As for you, you had better go to bed," Valerie went on after a moment. She
had placed the candles on a table, taken a chair near them and chosen a
review. She turned the pages while she spoke.
At this, he, too, being disposed of, he stopped before her. "And you wanted
me to be glad!"
Her eyes on the unseen print, she turned her pages, and now that they were
out of the woods and surrounded by walls and furniture and everyday
symbols, he saw that the pressure of his presence was heavier, and that she
blushed a deep, weary blush. But she was able and willing quite to dispose
of him. "I want you to be glad," she answered.
"For her!"--For that creature!--his words implied.
"It was natural, what she thought," said Valerie after a moment, though not
looking up.
"Natural!--To suspect you!"--
"Of what you wanted me to do?" Valerie asked. "Yes, it was quite natural, I
think, and partly because of your manoeuvers, my poor Jack. I understand it
all now. But the cause you espoused was already a doomed one, you see."
"Oh!" he almost groaned. "_You_ doomed it! Don't you feel any pity for
_him_?"
Valerie continued to look at her page, silently, for a moment, and it was
now indeed as though his question found some reverberating echo in herself.
But, in the silent moment, she thought it out swiftly and surely, grasping
old clues.
"No, Jack," she said, and she was giving herself, as well as him, the final
answer, "I don't pity him. He will never see Imogen baffled, warped, at
bay,--as we have. He will always see her crowned, successful, radiant. She
will count tremendously over there, far more than I ever would, because
she's so different, because she cares such a lot. And Imogen must count to
be radiant. She will help him in all sorts of ways, give him a new life;
she will help everybody. Do you remember what Eddy said of her, that if it
weren't for people of the Imogen type the cripples would die off like
anything!--That was true. She is one of the people who make the wheels of
the world go round. And it's a revival for a man like Sir Basil to live
with such a person. With me he would have faded back into the onlooker at
life; with Imogen he will live. And then, above all, quite above all, he is
in love with her. I think that he fell in love with her at first sight, as
Antigone, at her loveliest, except for to-night; to-night was her very
loveliest--because it was so real;--she would have claimed him from
me--before me--if he had come then; and her belief in herself, didn't you
see, Jack, how it illumined her?--And then, Jack, and this I'm afraid you
are forgetting, Imogen is a good girl, a very good girl. I can trust him to
her, you know. Her object in life will be to love him in the most
magnificent way possible. His happiness will be as much of an end to her as
her own."
It was, perhaps, the culminating symptom of his initiation, of his
transformation, when Jack, who had considered her while she spoke, standing
perfectly still, his hands in his pockets, his head bent, his eyes steadily
on her, now, finding nothing better to do than obey her first suggestion
and go to bed, took her hand before going, put it to his lips--and his
glance, as he kissed her hand, brought the tears, again, to Valerie's
eyes--and said: "Damn goodness."