A Fountain Sealed

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A FOUNTAIN SEALED

by

ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK

(Mrs. Basil de Selincourt)

Author of 'The Little French Girl,' 'Franklin Winslow Kane,' 'Tante,' etc.

I

Three people were sitting in a small drawing-room, the windows of which
looked out upon a wintry Boston street. It was a room rather empty and
undecorated, but the idea of austerity was banished by a temperature
so nearly tropical. There were rows of books on white shelves, a pale
Donatello cast on the wall, and two fine bronze vases filled with roses on
the mantelpiece. Over the roses hung a portrait in oils, very sleek and
very accurate, of a commanding old gentleman in uniform, painted by a
well-known German painter, and all about the room were photographs of young
women, most of them young mothers, with smooth heads and earnest faces,
holding babies. Outside, the snow was heaped high along the pavements
and thickly ridged the roofs and lintels. After the blizzard the sun was
shining and all the white glittered. The national colors, to a patriotic
imagination, were pleasingly represented by the red, white and blue of the
brick houses, the snow, and the vivid sky above.

The three people who talked, with many intimate pauses of silence, were all
Bostonians, though of widely different types. The hostess, sitting in an
easy chair and engaged with some sewing, was a girl of about twenty-six.
She wore a brown skirt of an ugly cut and shade and a white silk shirt,
adorned with a high linen collar, a brown tie and an old-fashioned gold
watch-chain. Her forehead was too large, her nose too short; but her lips
were full and pleasant and when she smiled she showed charming teeth. The
black-rimmed glasses she wore emphasized the clearness and candor of her
eyes. Her thick, fair hair was firmly fastened in a group of knobs down the
back of her head. There was an element of the grotesque in her appearance
and in her careful, clumsy movements, yet, with it, a quality almost
graceful, that suggested homely and wholesome analogies,--freshly-baked
bread; fair, sweet linen; the safety and content of evening firesides. This
was Mary Colton.

The girl who sat near the window, her furs thrown back from her shoulders,
a huge muff dangling from her hand, was a few years younger and exceedingly
pretty. Her skin was unusually white, her hair unusually black, her velvety
eyes unusually large and dark. In. her attitude, lounging, graceful,
indifferent, in her delicate face, the straight, sulky brows, the coldly
closed lips, the coldly observant eyes, a sort of permanent discontent was
expressed, as though she could find, neither in herself nor in the world,
any adequate satisfaction. This was Rose Packer.

The other guest, sitting sidewise on a stiff chair, his hand hanging over
the back, his long legs crossed, was a young man, graceful, lean and
shabby. He was clean-shaven, with brown skin and golden hair, an unruly
lock lying athwart his forehead. His face, intent, alert, was veiled in
an indolent nonchalance. He looked earnest, yet capricious, staunch, yet
sensitive, and one felt that, conscious of these weaknesses, he tried to
master or to hide them.

These three had known one another since childhood. Jack's family was old
and rich; Mary's old and poor; Rose Packer's new and of fantastic wealth.
Rose was a young woman of fashion and her whole aspect seemed to repudiate
any closeness of tie between herself and Mary, who passed her time in
caring for General Colton, her invalid father, attending committees, and,
as a diversion, going to "sewing-circles" and symphony concerts; but she
was fonder of Mary than of any one else in the world. Rose, who had, as
it were, been brought up all over the world, divided her time now between
two continents and quaintly diversified her dancing, hunting, yachting
existence by the arduous study of biology. Jack, in appearance more
ambiguous than either, looked neither useful nor ornamental; but, in point
of fact, he was a much occupied person. He painted very seriously, was
something of a scholar and devoted much of his time and most of his large
fortune to intricate benevolences. His shabby clothes were assumed, like
the air of indolence; his wealth irked him and, full of a democratic
transcendentalism, he longed to efface all the signs that separated him
from the average toiler. While Rose was quite ignorant of her own country
west of the Atlantic seaboard, Jack had wandered North, South, West. As
for Mary, she had hardly left Boston in her life, except to go to the
Massachusetts coast in summer and to pay a rare visit now and then to New
York. It was of such a visit that she had been talking to them and of the
friend who, since her own return home only a few days before, had suffered
a sudden bereavement in the death of her father. Jack Pennington, also a
near friend of Imogen Upton's, had just come from New York, where he had
been with her during the mournful ceremonies of death, and Mary Colton,
after a little pause, had said, "I suppose she was very wonderful through
it all."

"She bore up very well," said Jack Pennington. "There would never be
anything selfish in her grief."

"Never. And when one thinks what a grief it is. She is wonderful," said
Mary.

"You think every one wonderful, Molly," Rose Packer remarked, not at all
aggressively, but with her air of quiet ill-temper.

"Mary's enthusiasm has hit the mark this time," said Pennington, casting a
glance more scrutinizing than severe upon the girl.

"I really can't see it. Of course Imogen Upton is pretty--remarkably
pretty--though I've always thought her nose too small; and she is certainly
clever; but why should she be called wonderful?"

"I think it is her goodness, Rose," said Mary, with an air of gentle
willingness to explain. "It's her radiant goodness. I know that Imogen has
mastered philosophies, literatures, sciences--in so far as a young and very
busy girl can master them, and that very wise men are glad to talk to her;
but it's not of that one thinks--nor of her great beauty, either. Both seem
taken up, absorbed in that selflessness, that loving-kindness, that's like
a higher kind of cleverness--almost like a genius."

"She's not nearly so good as you are, Molly. And after all, what does she
do, anyway?"

Mary kept her look of leniency, as if over the half-playful naughtinesses
of a child. "She organizes and supports all sorts of charities, all sorts
of reforms; she is the wisest, sweetest of hostesses; she takes care of her
brother; she took care of her father;--she takes care of anybody who is in
need or unhappy."

"Was Mr. Upton so unhappy? He certainly looked gloomy;--I hardly knew him;
Eddy, however, I do know, very well; he isn't in the least unhappy. He
doesn't need help."

"I think we all need help, dear. As for Mr. Upton,--you know," Mary spoke
very gravely now, "you know about Mrs. Upton."

"Of course I do, and what's better, I know her herself a little. _Elle est
charmeuse_."

"I have never seen her," said Mary, "but I don't understand how you can
call a frivolous and heartless woman, who practically deserted her husband
and children, _charmeuse_;--but perhaps that is all that one can call her."

"I like frivolous people," said Rose, "and most women would have deserted
Mr. Upton, if what I've heard of him was true."

"What have you heard of him?"

"That he was a bombastic prig."

At this Mary's pale cheek colored. "Try to remember, Rose, that he died
only a week ago."

"Oh, he may be different now, of course."

"I can't bear to hear you speak so, Rose. I did know him. I saw a great
deal of him during this last year. He was a very big person indeed."

"Of course I'm a pig to talk like this, if you really liked him, Molly."

But Mary was not to be turned aside by such ambiguous apology. "You see,
you don't know, Rose. The pleasure-seeking, worldly people among whom you
live could hardly understand a man like Mr. Upton. Simply what he did for
civic reform,--worked himself to death over it. And his books on ethics,
politics. It isn't a question of my liking him. I don't know that I ever
thought of my feeling for him in those terms. It was reverence, rather, and
gratitude for his being what he was."

"Well, dear, I do remember hearing men, and not worldly men, as you call
them, either, say that his work for civic reform amounted to very little
and that his books were thin and unoriginal. As for that community place he
founded at, where was it?--Clackville? He meddled that out of life."

"He may have been Utopian, he may have been in some ways ineffectual; but
he was a good man, a wonderful, yes, Rose, a wonderful man,"

"And do you think that Molly has hit the mark in this, too?" Rose asked,
turning her eyes on Pennington. He had been listening with an air of light
inattention and now he answered tersely, as if conquering some inner
reluctance by over-emphasis, "Couldn't abide him."

Rose laughed out, though with some surprise in her triumph; and Mary,
redder than before, rejoined in a low voice, "I didn't expect you, Jack, to
let personal tastes interfere with fair judgment."

"Oh, I'm not judging him," said Jack.

"But do you feel with me," said Rose, "that it's no wonder that Mrs. Upton
left him."

"Not in the least," Pennington replied, glad, evidently, to make clear his
disagreement. "I don't know of any reason that Mrs. Upton had for deserting
not only her husband but her children."

"But have they been left? Isn't it merely that they prefer to stay?"

"Prefer to live in their own country? among their own people? Certainly."

"But she spends part of every year with them. There was never any open
breach."

"Everybody knew that she would not live with her husband and everybody knew
why," Mary said. "It has nearly broken Imogen's heart. She left him because
he wouldn't lead the kind of life she wanted to lead--the kind of life she
leads in England--one of mere pleasure and self-indulgent ease. She hasn't
the faintest conception of duty or of patriotism. She couldn't help her
husband in any way, and she wouldn't let him help her. All she cares for is
fashion, admiration and pretty clothes."

"Stuff and nonsense, my dear! She doesn't think one bit more about her
clothes than Imogen does. It requires more thought to look like a saint in
velvet than to go to the best dressmaker and order a trousseau. I wonder
how long it took Imogen to find out that way of doing her hair."

"Rose!--I must beg of you--I love her."

"But I'm saying nothing against her!"

"When I think of what she is suffering now, what you say sounds cruelly
irreverent. Jack, I know, feels as I do."

"Yes, he does," said the young man. He got up now and stood, very tall, in
the middle of the room looking down at Mary. "I must be off. I'll bring
you those books to-morrow afternoon--though I don't see much good in your
reading d'Annunzio."

"Why, if you do, Jack?" said Mary, with some wonder. And the degree of
intimate equality in the relations of these young people may be gaged by
the fact that he appeared to receive her rejoinder as conclusive.

"Well, he's interesting, of course, and if one wants to understand modern
decadence in an all-round way--"

"I want to understand everything," said Mary. "And please bring your best
Italian dictionary with them."

"Before you go, Jack," said Rose, "pray shut the register. It's quite
stifling in here."

"Far too hot," said Jack, showing his impartiality of spirit by his
seconding of Rose's complaint, for it was evident she had much displeased
him. "I've often told you, Mary, how bad it was for you. That's why you are
so pale."

"I'm so sorry. Have you been feeling it much? Leave the door into the hall
open."

"And do cast one glance, if only of disapprobation, upon me, Jack," Rose
pleaded in mock distress.

"You are a very amusing child, Rose, sometimes," was Pennington's only
answer.

"He's evidently very cross with me," said Rose, when he was gone. "While
you are not--you who have every right to be, angelic Molly."

"I hope you didn't realize, Rose, how you were hurting him."

"I?" Rose opened wide eyes. "How, pray?"

"Don't you know that he is devoted to Imogen Upton?"

"Why, who isn't devoted to her, except wicked me?"

"Devoted in particular--in love with her, I think," said Mary.

Rose's face took on a more acutely discontented look, after the pause in
which she seemed, though unrepentantly, to acquiesce in a conviction of
ineptitude. "Really in love with her?"

"I think so; I hope so."

"How foolish of him," said Rose. Mary, at this, rested a gaze so long and
so reproachful upon her that the discontent gave way to an affectionate
compunction. "The truth is, Mary, that I'm jealous; I'm petty; I'm horrid.
I don't like sharing you. I like you to like me most, and not to find other
people wonderful."

"If you own that you are naughty, Rose, dear, and that you try hard to be
naughtier than you really are, I can't be angry with you. But it does hurt
me, for your own sake, to see you--really malicious, dear."

"Oh, dear! Am I that?"

"Really you are."

"Because I called Imogen Upton a saint in velvet?--and like her mother so
much, much more?"

"Yes, because of that--and all the rest. As for jealousy, one doesn't love
people more because they are wonderful. One is glad of them and one longs
to share them. It's one of my dearest hopes that you may come to care for
Imogen as I do--and as Jack does."

Rose listened, her head bent forward, her eyes, ambiguous in their
half-ironic, half-tender, meaning, on her friend; but she only said, "_I_
shall remain in love with you, Mary." She didn't say again, though she was
thinking it, that Jack was very foolish.

II

"Darling, darling Mother:

"I know too well what you have been feeling since the cable reached you;
and first of all I want to help you to bear it by telling you at once that
you could not have reached him in time. You must not reproach yourself for
that.

"I am shattered by this long day. Father died early this morning, but I
must hold what strength I have, firmly, for you, and tell you all that you
will want to hear. He would have wished that; you know how he felt about a
selfish yielding to grief.

"He seemed quite well until the beginning of this week--five days ago--but
he was never strong; the long struggle that life must always mean to those
who face life as he did, wore on him more and more; for others' sakes he
often assumed a buoyancy of manner that, I am sure,--one feels these things
by intuition of those one loves--often hid suffering and intense weariness.
It was just a case of the sword wearing out the scabbard. A case of, 'Yes,
uphill to the very end.' I know that you did not guess how fragile the
scabbard had become, and you must not reproach yourself, darling, for that
either. We are hardly masters of the intuitions that warn us of these
things. Death teaches us so much, and, beside him, looking at his quiet
face, so wonderful in its peace and triumph, I have learned many lessons.
He has seemed to teach me, in his silence, the gentler, deeper sympathy
with temperament. You couldn't help it, darling, I seem to understand that
more and more. You weren't at the place, so to speak, where he could help
you. Oh, I want to be so tender with you, my mother,--and to help you to
wise, strong tenderness toward yourself.

"On Tuesday he worked, as usual, all morning; he had thrown himself heart
and soul, as you know, into our great fight with civic corruption--what a
worker he was, what a fighter! He was so wonderful at lunch, I remember.
I had my dear little Mary Colton with me and he held us both spellbound,
talking, with all his enthusiasm and ardor, of politics, art, life and the
living of life. Mary said, when she left me that day, that to know him had
been one of the greatest things in her experience. In the afternoon he went
to a committee meeting at the Citizens' Union. It was bitterly cold and
though I begged him to be selfish for once and take a cab, he wouldn't--you
remember his Spartan contempt of costly comforts--and I can see him now,
going down the steps, smiling, shaking his head, waving his hand, and
saying with that half-sad, half-quizzical, smile of his, 'Plenty of people
who need bread a good deal more than I need cabs, little daughter.' So, in
the icy wind, he walked to the cable-car, with its over-heated atmosphere.
He got back late, only in time to dress for dinner. Several interesting men
came and we had a splendid evening, really wonderful talk, _constructive_
talk, vitalizing, inspiring, of the world and the work to be done for it. I
noticed that father seemed flushed, but thought it merely the interest of
the discussion. He did not come down to breakfast next morning and when I
went to him I found him very feverish. He confessed then that he had caught
a bad chill the day before. I sent for the doctor at once, and for a little
while had no anxiety. But the fever became higher and higher and that night
the doctor said that it was pneumonia.

"Dearest, dearest mother, these last days are still too much with me for me
to feel able to make you see them clearly. It is all a tragic confusion in
my mind. Everything that could be done was done to save him. He had nurses
and consultations--all the aids of science and love. I wired for Eddy at
once, and dear Jack Pennington was with me, too, so helpful with his deep
sympathy and friendship. I needed help, mother, for it was like having my
heart torn from me to see him go. He was very calm and brave, though I am
sure he knew, and once, when I sat beside him, just put out his hand to
mine and said: 'Don't grieve overmuch, little daughter; I trust you to turn
all your sorrow to noble uses.' He spoke only once of you, dear mother,
but then it was to say: 'Tell her--I forgive. Tell her not to reproach
herself.' And then--it was the saddest, sweetest summing up, and it will
comfort you--'She was like a child.' At the end he simply went--sleeping,
unconscious. Oh, mother, mother!--forgive these tears, I am weak.... He
lies now, up-stairs, looking so beautiful--like that boyish portrait, you
remember, with the uplifted, solemn gaze--only deeper, more peaceful and
without the ardor....

"Darling mother, don't bother a bit about me. Eddy and Jack will help me in
everything, all our friends are wonderful to us.--Day after to-morrow we
are to carry him to his rest.--After that, when I feel a little stronger, I
will write again. Eddy goes to you directly after the funeral. If you need
me, cable for me at once. I have many ties and many claims here, but I will
leave them all to spend the winter with you, if you need me. For you may
not feel that you care to come to us, and perhaps it will be easier for you
to bear it over there, where you have so many friends and have made your
life. So if I can be of any help, any comfort, don't hesitate, mother dear.

"And--oh, I want to say it so lovingly, my arms around you--don't fear
that I have any hardness in my heart toward you. I loved him--with all
my soul--as you know; but if, sometimes, seeing his patient pain, I have
judged you, perhaps, with youth's over-severity,--all that is gone now. I
only feel our human weakness, our human need, our human sorrow. Remember,
darling, that our very faults, our very mistakes, are the things that may
help us to grow higher. Don't sink into a useless self-reproach. 'Turn your
sorrow to noble uses.' Use the past to light you to the future. Build on
the ruins, dear one. You have Eddy and me to live for, and we love you. God
bless you, my darling mother.

"IMOGEN."

This letter, written in a large, graceful and very legible hand, was being
read for the third time by the bereaved wife as she sat in the drawing-room
of a small house in Surrey on a cold November evening. The room was one of
the most finished comfort, comfort its main intention, but so thoroughly
attained that beauty had resulted as if unconsciously. The tea-table, the
fire, the wide windows, their chintz curtains now drawn, were the points
around which the room had so delightfully arranged itself. It was a room
a trifle overcrowded, but one wouldn't have wanted anything taken away,
the graceful confusion, on a background of almost austere order, gave the
happiest sense of adaptability to a variety of human needs and whims. Mrs.
Upton had finished her own tea, but the flame still burned in waiting under
the silver urn; books and reviews lay in reach of a lazy hand; lamps,
candle-light and flowers made a soft radiance; a small _griffon_ dozed
before the fire. The decoration of the room consisted mainly in French
engravings from Watteau and Chardin, in one or two fine black lacquer
cabinets and in a number of jars and vases of Chinese porcelain, some
standing on the floor and some on shelves, the neutral-tinted walls a
background to their bright, delicate colors.

Mrs. Upton was an appropriate center to so much ease and beauty. In deep
black though she was, her still girlish figure stretched out in a low
chair, her knees crossed, one foot held to the fire, she did not seem
to express woe or the poignancy of regret. The delicate appointments of
her dress, the freshness of her skin, her eyes, bright and unfatigued,
suggested nothing less than a widow plunged in remorseful grief. Her
eyes, indeed, were thoughtful, her lips, as she read her daughter's
communication, grave, but there was much discrepancy between her own aspect
and the letter's tone, and, letting it drop at last, she seemed herself
aware of it, sighing, glancing about her at the Chinese porcelain, the
tea-table, the dozing dog. She didn't look stricken, nor did she feel so.
The first fact only vaguely crossed her mind; the latter stayed and her
face became graver, sadder, in contemplating it. She contemplated it for a
long time, going over a retrospect in which her dead husband's figure and
her own were seen, steadily, sadly, but without severity for either.

Since the shock of the announcement, conveyed in a long, tender cable over
a week ago, she had had no time, as it were, to cast up these accounts with
the past. Her mind had known only a confused pain, a confused pity, for
herself and for the man whom she once had loved. The death, so long ago, of
that young love seemed more with her than her husband's death, which took
on the visionary, picture aspect of any tragedy seen from a distance, not
lived through. But now, in this long, firelit leisure, that was the final
summing of it all. She was grave, she was sad; but she could feel no
severity for herself, and, long ago, she had ceased to feel any for poor
Everard. They had been greatly mistaken in fancying themselves made for
each other, two creatures could hardly have been less so; but Everard had
been a good man and she,--she was a harmless woman. Both of them had meant
well. Of course Everard had always, and for everything, meant a great deal
more than she, in the sense of an intentional shaping of courses. She had
always owned that, had always given his intentions full credit; only, what
he had meant had bored her--she could not find it in herself now to fix on
any more self-exonerating term. After the first perplexed and painful years
of adjustment to fundamental disappointment she had at last seen the facts
clearly and not at all unkindly, and it seemed to her that, as far as her
husband went, she had made the best of them. It was rather odious of her,
no doubt, to think it now, but it seemed the truth, and, seen in its light,
poor little Imogen's exhortations and consolations were misplaced. Once or
twice in reading the letter she had felt an inclination to smile, an
inclination that had swiftly passed into compunction and self-reproach.

Yes, there it was; she could find very little of self-reproach within her
in regard to her husband; but in regard to Imogen her conscience was not
easy, and as her thoughts passed to her, her face grew still sadder and
still graver. She saw Imogen, in the long retrospect,--it was always
Imogen, Eddy had never counted as a problem--first as a child whom she
could take abroad with her for French, German, Italian educational
experiences; then as a young girl, very determined to form her own
character, and sure, with her father to second her assurance, that
boarding-school was the proper place to form it. Eddy was also at school,
and Mrs. Upton, with the alternative of flight or an unbroken tete-a-tete
with her husband before her, chose the former. There was no breach, no
crash; any such disturbances had taken place long before; she simply slid
away, and her prolonged absences seemed symbols of fundamental and long
recognized divisions. She came home for the children's holidays; built,
indeed, the little house among the Vermont hills, so that she might, as it
were, be her husband's hostess there. She hoped, through the ambiguous
years, for Imogen's young-womanhood; looking forward to taking her place
beside her when the time came for her first steps in the world. But here,
again, Imogen's clear-cut choice interfered. Imogen considered girlish
frivolities a foolish waste of time; she would take her place in the world
when she was fully equipped for the encounter; she was not yet equipped to
her liking and she declared herself resolved on a college course.

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