A Fountain Sealed

A >> Anne Douglas Sedgwick >> A Fountain Sealed

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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.

XXIII

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 role 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.

XXIV

She had seen through him and she continued to see through him.

She had little opportunity for more than this passive part on the next day,
a day of goings and comings, when the Pottses went, and Rose, Mary, and
Eddy, arrived.

He was guarding her mother's lover for her, guarding him from the
allurement of her own young loveliness; that was the way Jack saw it. He
was very skilful, very competent, she had to own that as she watched him;
but he was not quite so omniscient as he imagined himself to be, for he
did not know that she saw. That was Imogen's one clue in those two or
three days of fear and confusion, days when, actually, Jack did succeed in
keeping her and Sir Basil apart. And she must make no endeavor to thwart
his watchfulness; she must yield with apparent unconsciousness to his
combinations, combinations that always separated her and Sir Basil; she
must see him drive off with Sir Basil to meet the new-comers; must see him
lead Sir Basil away with himself and Eddy for a masculine smoke and talk;
must see him, after dinner, fix them all, irrevocably, at bridge for the
rest of the evening,--and not stir a finger;--for he did not know that she
saw and he did not know that she, as well as Sir Basil, needed guarding. It
was here that Imogen's intuition failed her, and that her blindness made
Jack's task the easier.

Imogen, in these days, had little time for self-observation. She seemed
living in some dark, fierce region of her nature, unknown to her till now,
where she found only fear and fury and the deep determination not to be
defeated and bereft. So supremely real were will and instinct, that, seen
from their dominion, conscience, reason, all the spiritual tests she had
lived by, looked like far, pale clouds floating over some somber, burning
landscape, where, among flames and darkness, she was running for her
life. Reason, conscience, were still with her, but turned to the task of
self-preservation. "He is mine. I know it. I felt it. They shall not take
him from me. It is my right, my duty, to keep him, for he is all that I
have left in life." The last veil descended upon her soul when, her frosty
young nature fired by the fierceness of her resolution, she felt herself to
be passionately in love with Sir Basil.

On the third day, the third day of her _vita nuova_--so she named it--Jack
had organized a picnic. They were to drive ten miles to a mountain lake
among pine woods, and, thrilling all through with rage, Imogen saw Sir
Basil safely maneuvered into the carriage with her mother, Rose, and Eddy,
while she was assigned to Jack, Miss Bocock, and Mary.

She heard herself talk sweetly and fluently during the long, sunny, breezy
drive, heard Jack answering and assenting with a fluency, a sweetness as
apt. Mary was very silent, but Miss Bocock, no doubt, found nothing amiss
in the tone of their interchange. Arrived at the beautiful spot fixed on,
sunlight drifting over glades of fern, the shadowy woods encircling a lake
of blue and silver, she could say, with just the right emphasis of helpless
admiration: "Wonderful--wonderful;"--could quote a line of Wordsworth,
while her eye passed over the figure of Sir Basil, talking to Rose at a
little distance, and over Jack's figure, near at hand.

Jack and Eddy had driven, and the moment came when they were occupied with
their horses. She joined the others, and, presently, she was able to draw
Sir Basil a little aside, and then still a little further, until, among the
rosy aisles, she had him to herself. Stooping to gather a tiny cone she
said to him in a low voice:--"Well?--well?--What did she say?"

Sir Basil, too, lowered his voice:--"I've wanted a chance to tell you about
it. My dear child, I'm so very sorry, but I've been a failure. She won't
hear of it. You'll have to give it up."

"She utterly refused?" How far this matter of her father was from her
thoughts--as far as the pale clouds above the fierce, dark landscape.

"Utterly."

"You asked for your sake, as well as for mine?"

"I asked for both our sakes."

"And," still stooping, her face hidden from him, she pierced to find the
significance of that moonlight hand-clasp,--"and--she made you agree with
her?"

"Agree with, her?--I was most dreadfully disappointed, and I had to tell
her so.--How could I agree with her?"

"She might have made you."

"She didn't make me;--didn't try to, I'm bound to say."

"But,"--her voice breathed up to him now with a new gentleness,--a
gentleness that, he well might think, covered heart-brokenness,--"but--you
haven't quarreled with her,--on my account? I couldn't bear her to
lose things, on my account. She thinks of you as a friend--values your
friendship;--I know it,--I am sure of it,--even though she would not do
this for you. Some hatreds are too deep to yield to any appeal; but it is
friendship I know;--and I love her--in spite of everything."

She had murmured on and on, parting the ferns with her delicate hand,
finding here and there a little cone, and as Sir Basil looked down at the
golden hair, the pure line of the cheek, a great wave of thanksgiving for
the surety of his freedom rose in him.

"Dear, sweet child," he said, "this is just what I would expect of you. But
don't let that thought trouble you for one moment. I do think her wrong,
but we are perhaps better friends than ever. You and I will always care for
her"--Sir Basil's voice faltered a little as, to himself, the significance
of these last words was borne in upon him, and Imogen, hearing the falter,
rose, feeling that she must see as well as hear.

And as she faced him they heard Jack's cheery call:

"Sir Basil--I say, Sir Basil!--You are wanted. You must help with the
hampers."

Imogen controlled every least sign of exasperation; it was the easier,
since she had gained something from this snatched interview. Her mother had
in no way harmed her in Sir Basil's eyes, and this avowal of friendship
might include an abdication of nearer claims. And so she walked back beside
him--telling him that her cones were for her little cripples. "You are
always thinking about some one else's happiness," said Sir Basil--with
a tranquillity less feigned than it had been of late. Nothing was lost,
nothing really desperate yet. But, during the rest of the afternoon, while
they made tea, spread viands, sat about on the moss and rocks laughing,
talking, eating, the sense of risk did not leave her. Nothing was lost,
yet, but it was just possible that what she had, in her folly, expected to
happen the other night to her and Jack, might really happen to Sir Basil
and her mother; in the extremity of alienation they might find the depths
of need. He thought her wrong, but he also thought her charming.

Sitting a little above them all, on a higher rock, watching them while
seeming not to watch, she felt that her sense of peril strangely isolated
her from the thoughtless group. She could guess at nothing from her
mother's face. She had not spoken with her mother since the day of
the disaster--and of the dawn. It was probable that, like her own sad
benignity, her mother's placidity was nothing but a veil, but she could not
believe that it veiled a sense of peril. Under her white straw hat, with
broad black ribbons tying beneath the chin, it was very pale--but that was
usual of late--and very worn, too, as it should be; but it was more full
of charm than it had any right to be. Her mother--oh! despite pallor and
fading--was a woman to be loved; and that she believed herself a woman
loved, Imogen, with a deep stirring of indignation and antagonism,
suspected. Yes, she counted upon Sir Basil, of that Imogen was sure,
but what she couldn't make out was whether her mother guessed that her
confidence was threatened. Did she at all see where Sir Basil's heart had
turned, as Jack had seen? Was her mother, too, capable of Jack's maneuvers?

From her mother she looked at Sir Basil, looked with eyes marvelously
serene. He lounged delightfully. His clothes were delightfully right; they
seemed as much a part of his personality as the cones were of the pines,
the ferns of the long glades. Rightness--exquisite, unconscious rightness,
was what he expressed. Not the rightness of warfare and effort that Imogen
believed in and stood for, but a rightness that had come to him as a gift,
not as a conquest, just as the cones had come to the pine-trees. The way
he tilted his Panama hat over his eyes so that only his chin and crisply
twisted mustache were unshadowed, the way in which he held his cigarette in
a hand so brown that the gold of the seal ring upon it looked pale, even
the way in which he wagged, now and then, his foot in its shapely tan
shoe,--were all as delightful as his limpid smile up at her mother, as his
voice, deep, decisive, and limpid, too.

Imogen was not aware of these appreciations in herself as she watched him
with that serene covertness, not at all aware that her senses were lending
her a hand in her struggle for possession and ascendancy, and giving to
her hold on the new and threatened belonging a peculiar tenacity. But she
did tell herself, again and again, with pride and pain, that this at last
was love, a love that justified anything, and that cast all lesser things
aside. And, with this thought of rejection, Imogen found her eyes turning
to Jack. She looked at Jack as serenely as she had at Sir Basil, and at him
she could trust herself to look more fixedly.

Jack's rightnesses were not a bit like those of nature. He was hesitant,
unfinished, beside Sir Basil. His voice was meager, his form was meager,
his very glance lacked the full, untroubled assurance of the other's. As
for his clothes, with a sly little pleasure Imogen noted, point by point,
how they just missed easy perfection. Very certainly this man who had
failed her was a trophy not comparable to the man who now cared. She
told herself that very often, emphasizing the unfavorable contrast. For,
strangely enough, it was now, at the full distance of her separation
from Jack, an irrevocable separation, that she needed the support of
such emphasis. In Jack's absent stare at the lake, his nervous features
composed to momentary unconsciousness, she could but feel a quality that,
helplessly, she must appreciate. There was in the young man's face a
purity, a bravery, a capacity of subtle spiritual choice that made it,
essentially, one of the most civilized she had ever known. Sir Basil's
brain, if it came to comparison, lacked one or two convolutions that Jack's
undoubtedly possessed.

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