It was on a late October day that Jack Pennington rode over the hills to
Valerie's summer home.
Two months were gone since Imogen's reporter-haunted nuptials had been
celebrated in the bland little country church that raised its white steeple
from the woodlands. Jack had been present at them; decency had made that
necessary, and a certain grimness in his aspect was easily to be
interpreted in a dismal, defeated rival. It was as such, he knew, that he
was seen there.
It had been a funny wedding,--to apply none of the other terms that lay
deeper in him. In watching it from the white-wreathed chancel he had
thought of Valerie's summing-up: "Imogen is one of the people who make the
world go round." The world in every phase had been there, from the British
ambassador and the Langleys to the East Side club girls--brought up from
New York in the special train--and a flourishing consignment of cripples
and nurses. Here and there in her path Imogen might meet the blankness of a
Miss Bocock, the irony of a Mrs. Wake, a disillusion like Mary's, an
insight like his own; but the great world, in its aspect of power and
simplicity, would be with her always. He had realized as never before
Imogen's capacity, when he saw the cohorts of her friends and followers
overflow the church.
She had been a fitting center to it all; though the center, for Jack, was
Valerie, exquisite, mildly radiant, not a hint on her of dispossession or
of doom; but Imogen, white and rapt and grave, had looked almost as
wonderful as on the day when she had first dawned upon Sir Basil's vision.
Jack, watching her uplifted profile as she stood at the altar-rail, found
himself trivially, spitefully, irrelevantly murmuring:--"Her nose _is_ too
small." And yet she looked more than ever like a Botticelli Madonna.
Rose and Eddy were to be married that winter in New York, a gigantic
opportunity for the newspapers, for already half the world seemed trooping
to the festivities. Afterward, with old-fashioned Americanism, they would
live in quite a little house and try to forget about Rose's fortune until
Eddy made his.
Valerie was to have none of the bother of this wedding. Mrs. Packer, a
mournful, jeweled, faded little beauty, was well fitted to cope with such
emergencies. Her secretaries sat already with pens poised.
Imogen's wedding had kept her mother working like a galley-slave, so Rose
told Jack, with the familiarity that was now justifiable in one who was
almost of the family, and that Eddy had told her, with much disgust of
demeanor, that its financing had eaten pretty deeply into his mother's
shrunken means. Rose made no open denunciation; she, no more than anyone
else, could guess from Jack's silence what his feeling about Imogen might
really be. But she was sure that he was well _over_ her, and that, above
all, he was one of the elect who _saw_ Mrs. Upton; she could allow herself
a musing survey of all that the mother had done for the daughter, adding,
and it was really with a wish for strict justice: "Of course Imogen never
had any idea of money, and she'll never realize what she cost." In another
and a deeper sense it might be that that was the kindest as well as the
truest thing to say of Imogen.
Since the wedding he knew that Valerie had been quietly at the little house
among the hills, alone for the most part, though Mrs. Wake was often with
her and the Pakenhams had paid her a visit on their way back to England.
Now Mrs. Wake was gone back to New York, and her own departure was to take
place in a few days. Jack, spending a week-end with friends not beyond
riding distance, felt that he must see her again in the surroundings where
he had come to know her so well and to know himself as so changed.
He rode over the crests of hills in the flaming, aromatic woods. The fallen
leaves paved his way with gold. In the deep distances, before him a still,
blue haze, like the bloom on ripe grape-clusters, lay over the purples of
the lower ranges. Above, about, before him was the blue sky of the
wonderful American "fall," high, clear, crystalline. The air was like an
elixir. Jack's eyes were for all this beauty,--"the vast, unconscious
scenery of my land," the line that drifted in his thoughts,--his own
consciousness, taken up into his contemplation, seeming as vast and as
unperplexed. But under his calm, his happy sadness, that, too, seemed a
part of the day, ran, like the inner echo to the air's intoxication, a
stream of deep, still excitement.
He did not think directly of Valerie, but vague pictures passed,
phantom-like, before his mind. He saw her in her garden, gathering late
flowers; he saw her reading under the fringe of vine-leaves and tendrils;
he saw her again in the wintry New York of snow, sunlight, white, gold and
blue, or smiling down from the high-decked steamer against a sky of frosty
rose; he saw her on all possible and adequate backgrounds of the land he so
loved. But,--oh, it was here that the under-current, the stream of
excitement seemed to rise, foaming, circling, submerging him, choking him,
with tides of grief and desolation,--seeing her, too, in that land she
loved;--not in the Surrey garden, no, no,--that was shut to her for
ever;--but in some other, some distant garden, high-walled, the pale gold
and gray of an autumnal sunset over its purpling bricks, or on a
flower-dappled common in spring, or in spring woods filled with wild
hyacinths and primroses. How he could see her, place her, over there, far,
far away, from his country--and from him.
It was, after the last sharp trot, the last leisurely uphill canter, on the
bordering, leaf-strewn grass of the winding road, where the white walls and
gray roof of the little house showed among the trees, that all the
undercurrent seemed to center in a knot of suffocating expectancy and pain.
And Valerie, while Jack so rode, so approached her, was fulfilling one of
his visions. She had spent the afternoon in her garden, digging, planting,
"messing" as she expressed it, very happily among her borders, where late
flowers, purple and white and gold, still bloomed. She was planning all
sorts of things for her garden, a row of double-cherry-trees to stand at
the edges of the woods and be symbols of paradise in spring, with their
deep upon deep of miraculous white. Little almond-trees, too, frail sprays
of pink on a spring sky, and quince-trees that would show in autumn among
ample foliage the pale gold of their softly-furred fruit. She wanted spring
flowers to run back far into the woods, the climbing roses and honeysuckle
to make summer delicious among the vines of the veranda. The afternoon,
full of such projects, passed pleasantly, and when she came in and dressed
for her solitary tea, she felt pleasantly tired. She walked up and down the
drawing-room, its white walls warm with the reflections of outer sunlight,
listening vaguely to the long trail of her black tea-gown behind her,
looking vaguely from the open windows at the purple distances set in their
nearer waves of flame.
At the end of the room, before the austere little mantelpiece, she paused
presently to look at herself in the austere little mirror with its
compartments of old gilt; at herself, the illuminated white of the room
behind her reflection. A narrow crystal vase mirrored itself beside her
leaning arm, and its one tall rose, set among green leaves and russet stems
and thorns, spread depths of color near her cheek. Valerie's eyes went from
her face to the rose. The rose was fresh, glowing, perfect. Her face,
lovely still, was faded.
She stood there, leaning beside the flower, the fingers of her supporting
hand sunken deep in the chestnut masses of her hair, and noted, gravely,
earnestly, the delicate signs and seals of stealing age.
Never, never again would her face be like the rose, young, fresh, perfect.
And she herself was no longer young; in her heart she knew the stillness,
the droop, the peace--almost the peace--of softly-falling petals.
How young she had been, how lovely, how full of sweetness. That was the
thought that pierced her suddenly, the thought of wasted sweetness,
unrecorded beauty, unnoted, unloved, all to go, to pass away for ever. It
seemed hardly for herself she grieved, but for the doom of all youth and
loveliness; for the fleeting, the impermanence of all life. The vision of
herself passed to a vision of the other roses, the drooping, the doomed,
scattering their petals in the chill breeze of coming winter.
"Poor things," was her thought,--her own self-pity had part only in its
inclusiveness,--"summer is over for all of us."
And with the thought, girlishly, still girlishly, she hid her face upon her
arms as she stood there, murmuring:--"Ah, I hate, I hate getting old."
A step at the door roused her. She turned to see Jack entering.
Jack looked very nice in the tans and russets of his riding-tweeds and
gaiters. The chill air had brought a clear color to his cheeks; the pale
gold of his hair,--one unruly lock, as usual, over-long, lying across his
forehead,--shone like sunlight; his gray eyes looked as deep and limpid as
a mountain pool.
Valerie was very, very glad to see him. He embodied the elixir, the color,
the freshness of the world to-day: and oh how young--how young--how
fortunately, beautifully young he looked;--that was the thought that met
him from the contrast of the mirror.
She gave him her hands in welcome, and they sat down near a window where
the sunlight fell upon them and the breeze blew in upon them, she on a
little sofa, among chintz cushions, he on a low chair beside her; and while
they talked, that excitement, that pain and expectancy grew in Jack.
The summer was over and, soon, it must be, she would go. With a wave of
sadness that sucked him back and swept him forward in a long, sure ache,
came the knowledge, deeper than before, of his own desolation. But, sitting
there beside her in the October sunlight; feeling, with the instinct, so
quick, so sensitive in him, that it was in sadness he had found her, the
desolation wasn't so much for himself as for her, what she represented and
stood for. He, too, seeing her face with the blooming rose beside it, had
known her piercing thought.
She was going; but in other senses, too. She had begun to go; and all the
sacrifices, the relinquishments, the acceptances of the summer, were the
first steps of departure. She had done with things and he, who had not yet
done with them, was left behind. Already the signs of distance were upon
her--he saw them as she had seen them--her distance from the world of
youth, of hope, of effort.
A thin veil, like the sad-sweet haze over the purpling hills, seemed to
waver between them; the veil that, for all its melting elusiveness, parts
implacably one generation from another. Its dimness seemed to rest on her
bright hair and to hover in her bright eyes; to soften, as with a faint
melancholy, the brightness of her smile. And it was as if he saw her, with
a little sigh, unclasp her hands, that had clung to what she fancied to be
still her share of life,--unclasp her hands, look round her with a slight
amaze at the changed season where she found herself, and, after the
soundless pause of recognition, bend her head consentingly to the quiet,
obliterating snows of age. And once more his own change, his own initiation
to subtler standards, was marked by the fact that when the old, ethical
self, still over-glib with its assurances, tried to urge upon him that all
was for the best in a wonderful world, ventured to murmur an axiom or so as
to the grace, the dignity, the added spiritual significance of old age, the
new self, awakened to tragedy, turned angry eyes upon that vision of the
rose in the devastated garden, and once more muttered, in silence:--"Damn!"
They had talked of the past and of the coming marriage, very superficially,
in their outer aspects; they had talked of his summer wanderings and of the
Pakenhams' visit to Vermont. She had given him tea and she had told him of
her plans for the winter;--she had given up the New York house, and had
taken a little flat near Mrs. Wake's, that she was going to move to in a
few days from now. And Jack said at last, feeling that with the words he
dived from shallows into deeps:--"And--when are you going back?--back to
England?"
"Going back?"--She repeated his words with vagueness.
"Yes; to where you've always liked to live."
"Yes; I liked living there," said Valerie, still with vagueness in her
contemplative "yes."
"And still like it."
She seemed to consider. "Things have changed, you know. It was change I
used to want, I looked for it, perhaps mistakenly. Now it has come of
itself. And I feel a great unwillingness to move on again."
The poignant vision of something bruised, dimmed, listless, was with him,
and it was odd to hear himself urging:--"But in the meantime, you, too,
have changed. The whole thing over here, the thing we so care for, isn't
yours. You don't really care about it much, if at all. It doesn't really
please you. It gives you with effort what you can get with ease, over
there, and it must jar on you, often. We are young; crude; all the
over-obvious things that are always said of us; our enthusiasms are too
facile; our standards of achievement, in the things you care for, rather
second-rate; oh, you know well enough what I mean. We are not crystallized
yet into a shape that's really comfortable for a person like you:--perhaps
we never shall be; perhaps I hope that we never shall be. So why shouldn't
you go to a place where you can have all the things you like?"
She listened to him in silence, with, at the end, a slight smile for the
exactitude of his: "Perhaps I hope that we never shall be;"--and she paused
now as if his portrayal of her own wants required consideration. "Perhaps,"
she said at length, "perhaps I never cared so much about all those things."
"Oh, but you do," said Jack with conviction.
"You mean, I suppose, all the things people over here go away so much to
get. No, I don't think so. It was never really that. I don't think"--and
she seemed to be thinking it out for herself as well as for him--"that I've
ever been so conscious of standards--crystallizations--the relative values
and forms of things. What I wanted was freedom. Not that I was ever
oppressed or ill-treated, far from it;--but I was too--uncomfortable. I was
like a bird forced to live like a fish, or perhaps we had better say, like
a fish forced to live like a bird. That was why I went. I couldn't breathe.
And, yes, I like the life over there. It's very easy and gliding; it
protects you from jars; it gives you beauty for the asking;--here we have
to make it as a rule. I like the people, too, and their unconsciousness.
One likes us, you know, Jack, for what is conscious in us--and it's so much
that there's hardly a bit of us that isn't conscious. We know our way all
over ourselves, as it were, and can put all of ourselves into the window if
we want someone else to know us. One often likes them for their
unconsciousness, for all the things behind the window, all the things they
know nothing at all about, the things that are instinctive, background
things. It makes a more peaceful feeling. One can wander about dim rooms,
as it were, and rest in them; one doesn't have to recognize, and respond so
much. Yes, I shall miss it all, in a great many ways. But I like it here,
too. For one thing, there is a great deal more to do."
Jack, in some bewilderment, was grasping at clues. One was that, as he had
long ago learned of her, she was incapable of phrases, even when they were
sincere, incapable of dramatizing herself, even if her situation lent
itself to tragic interpretations. Uncomfortable?--was that all that she
found to say of her life, her suffocating life, among the fishes? She could
put it aside with that. And as for the rest, he realized suddenly, with a
new illumination--at what a late date it was for him to reach it; he, who
had thought that he knew her so well!--that she cared less, in reality, for
all those "things" lacking in the life of her native land than the bulk of
her conscious, anxious countrymen. Cared not enough, his old self of
judgment and moral appraisement would have pronounced. She wasn't
intellectual, nor was she esthetic; that was the funny part of it, about a
person whose whole being diffused a sense of completeness that was like a
perfume. Art, culture, a complicated social life, being on the top of
things, as it were, were not the objects of her concentration. It was
indeed her indifference to them, her independence of them, that made her,
for his wider consciousness, oddly un-American.
In the midst of bewilderment and illumination one thing stood clear, a
trembling joy; he had to make assurance doubly sure. "If you are not going
away, what _will_ you do?"
"I don't know";--he would, once, have rebuked the smile with which she said
it as indolent;--"I wasn't thinking of anything definite, for myself. I'll
watch other people do--you, for instance, Jack. I shall spend most of my
time here in the country; New York is so expensive; I shall garden--wait
till you see what I make of this in a few years' time; I shall look after
Rose and Eddy--at a tactful distance."
"But your wider life? Your many friends, over there?" Jack still protested,
fearing that he saw more clearly than she to what a widow with a tiny,
crippled fortune was consigning herself in this country of the young and
striving. "You need gaiety, brilliancy, big, bright vistas." It was strange
to hear himself urging his thought for her against that inner throb. Again
she gave him her grave, brief smile. "You forget, Jack, that I'm--cured.
I'm quite old enough not to mind giving up."
The warm, consoling assurance was with him, of her presence near his life;
but under it the excitement, the pain, had so risen that he wondered if she
did not read them in his eyes.
The evening was growing late; the sky had turned to a pale, translucent
gold, streaked, over the horizon, by thin, cold, lilac-colored clouds. He
must go, leaving her there, alone, and, in so doing, he would leave
something else behind him forever. For it was now, as the veil fell upon
her, as the evening fell over the wide earth, it was now or never that he
could receive the last illumination. He hardly saw clearly what that might
be; it wavered like a hovering light behind the mist.
He rose and walked up and down the room a little; pausing to look from the
windows at the golden sky; pausing to look, now and then, at her, sitting
there in her long, black dress, vaguely shadowed on the outer light,
smiling, tranquil, yet sad, so sad.
"So, our summer is at an end," he said, turning at last from the window.
"The air has a frosty tang already. I suppose I must be off. I shall not
see you again until New York. I'm glad--I'm glad that you are to be there";
and now he stammered suddenly, a little--"more glad than I can say."
"Thanks, Jack," she answered, her eyes fondly dwelling on him. "You are one
of the things I would not like to leave."
Again he walked up and down, and seemed to hear the steady flow of that
still, deep excitement. Why, above it, should he say silly, meaningless
words, that were like a bridge thrown over it to lead him from her?
"I want to tell you one thing, just one, before I go," he said. He knew
that, with his sudden resolution, his voice had changed and, to quiet
himself, he stood before her and put both hands on the back of a chair that
was between them. He couldn't go on building that bridge. He must dare
something, even if something else he must not dare--unless, unless she let
him. "I must tell you that you are the most enchanting person I have ever
known."
She looked at him quietly, though she was startled, not quite
understanding, and she said a little sadly: "Only that, Jack?"
"Yes, only that, for you, because you don't need the trite, obvious labels
that one affixes to other people. You don't need me to say that you are
good or true or brave;--it's like a delicate seal that comprises and
expresses everything,--the trite things and the strange, lovely
things--when I say that you are enchanting." He held his mind, so
conscious, under the words, of what he must not say, to the intellectual
preoccupation of making her see, at all events, just what the words he
could say meant.
But as his voice rang, tense, vibrant as a tightened cord in the still
room, as his eyes sank into hers, Valerie felt in her own dying youth the
sudden echo to all he dared not say.
She had never seen, quick as she was to see the meaning behind words and
looks. She suspected that he, also, had never seen it clearly till now.
Other claims had dropped from them; the world was gone; they were alone,
his eyes on hers; and between them was the magic of life.
Yes, she had it still, the gift, the compelling charm. His eyes in their
young strength and fear and adoration called to her life, and with a touch,
a look, she could bring to it this renewal and this solace. And, behind her
sorrow, her veil, her relinquishment, Valerie was deeply thrilled.
The thrill went through her, but even while she knew it, it hardly moved
her. No; the relinquishment had been too deep. She had lost forever, in
losing the other. That had been to turn her back on life, or, rather, to
see it turn its back on her, forever. Not without an ugly crash of inner,
twisted discord could she step once more from the place of snow, or hold
out her hand to love.
All his life was before him, but for her--; for her it was finished. And as
she mastered the thrill, as she turned from the vision of what his eyes
besought and promised, a flow of pity, pity for his youth and pain and for
all the long way he was yet to go, filled her, bringing peace, even while
the sweetness of the unsought, undreamed of offering made her smile again,
a trembling smile.
"Dear Jack, thank you," she said.
Suddenly, before her smile, her look, he flushed deeply, taking from her
eyes what his own full meaning had been. Already it was in the past, the
still-born hope; it was dead before he gazed upon it; but he must hear the
death-warrant from her lips, it was not enough to see it, so gentle, so
pitiful, so loving, in her eyes, and he heard himself stammering:--"You--
you haven't anything else you can say to me?"
She had found her answer in a moment, and now indeed she was at the helm,
steering them both past white shores, set in such depths of magical blue,
white shores where sirens sang. Never could they land there, never listen
to the song. And already she seemed to hear it, as if from a far distance,
ringing, sharp and strange with the swiftness of their flight, as she
replied: "Nothing else, dear Jack, except that I wish you were my son."
The enchanted island had sunk below the horizon. They were landed, and on
the safest, sanest, shores. She knew that she had achieved her own place,
and that from it, secure, above him, the veil between them, her smile was
the smile of motherhood. To smile so was to put before him finally the fact
that her enchantment contradicted and helplessly lured him to forget. She
would never forget it now, nor could he. She was Imogen's mother, and she
was old enough to be his.
From her smile, her eyes, common-sense flooded Jack, kind, yet stinging,
too, savoring of a rescue from some hidden danger,--not his--not his--his
was none of the common-sense,--but hers. He might had she let him, have so
dislocated her life.
He was scarlet, stammering. He knew that he hid nothing from her now, that
he didn't want or need to hide anything. Those benign, maternal eyes would
understand. And he smiled, too, but also with a trembling smile, as he
reached out to her hand, holding it tightly and saying, gazing at her:--"I
love you so."
Her hand held his, in farewell now, but her look up at him promised
everything, everything for the future,--except the one now shrouded thing.
"And I love you, dear Jack," she said. "You have taken the place of--almost
everything."
And then, for she saw the tears in his eyes, and knew that his heart was
bleeding, not for himself alone, she rose and took his head between her
hands, and, like a mother, kissed him above his eyes.
* * * * *
When he had left her,--and they said no further word,--Valerie did not
again relapse into a despondent attitude.
The sky was like a deep rose, soft, dim, dying, and the color of the
afterglow filled the room.
Standing at the window she breathed in the keen, sweet air, and looked from
the dying day down to her garden.
She had watched Jack disappear among the trees, waving to him, and her
heart followed his aching heart with comprehending pity. But, from her
conquest of the thrill, a clear, contemplative insight was left with her,
so that, looking out over the lives she was to watch, she felt herself, for
all her sadness, a merry, if a serious fate, mingling the threads of
others' fortunes with a benignant hand.
Imogen's threads had snapped off very sharply. Imogen would be the better
pleased that the Surrey cottage should know her no more. The pang for the
wrecking of all maternal hope passed strangely into a deeper pang for all
that the Surrey cottage stood for in her life, all the things that she had
left to come to Imogen. She remembered. And, for a moment, the old vortex
of whirling anguish almost engulfed her. Only long years could deaden the
pang of that parting. She would not dwell on that. Eddy and Rose; to turn
to them was to feel almost gay. Jack and Mary;--yes, on these last names
her thoughts lingered and her gaze for them held tender presages. That must
be.
Jack would not know how her maternal solicitude was to encompass him and
mold his way. If the benignant fate saw clearly, Jack and Mary were to
marry. Strange that it should not be from anything of her own that the
deepest call upon her fostering tenderness came. She wasn't needed by
anything of her own. This was the tragedy of her life that, more than youth
passed and love renounced, seemed to drift snows upon her.
But, beyond the personal pang and failure, she could look down at her
garden and out at the quiet, evening vistas. The very flowers seemed to
smile gentle promises to her, and to murmur that, after all, rather than
bitterness, failure was to bring humble peace.
Leaning her head against the window, where in the breeze the curtain softly
flapped, she looked out at the tranquil twilight, contented to be sad.
"I will have friends with me," she said to herself; "I will garden and
learn a new language. I will read a great many books." And, with a sense of
happy daring, not rebuked by reason, she could add, thinking of the mingled
threads:--"I will have them often here to stay with me, and, perhaps, they
will let me spoil the babies."