A Fountain Sealed

A >> Anne Douglas Sedgwick >> A Fountain Sealed

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"I will," Valerie smiled, adding, "but Imogen is very pretty, too, you
know."

"Yes, I know; one can see that in the photographs," said Sir Basil. There
were several of these standing about the room and he get up to look at
them, one after the other--Imogen in evening, in day dress, all showing her
erect slenderness, her crown of hair, her large, calm eyes.

"She looks kind but very cool, you know," he commented. "She would take one
in at a great rate; not find much use for an every-day person like me."

"Oh, you won't be an every-day person to Imogen. And her great point, I
think, is her finding a use for everybody."

"Making them useful to her?"

"No--to themselves--to the world in general."

"Improving them, do you mean?"

"Well, yes, I should say that was more it. She likes to give people a
lift."

"But--she's so very young. How does she manage it?" Sir Basil queried over
the photograph, whose eyes dwelt on him while he spoke,

"Oh, you'll see," Valerie smiled a little at his pertinacity. "I've no
doubt that she will improve you."

"Well," said Sir Basil, recognizing her jocund intention, "she's welcome
to try. As long as you are there to see that she isn't too hard on me." He
dismissed Imogen, then, from his sight and thoughts, replacing her on the
writing-table and suggesting that Mrs. Upton should take a little walk with
him. His horse had been put into the stable and he could come back for him.
Mrs. Upton said that when they came back he must stay to lunch and that be
could ride home afterward, and this was agreed on; so that in ten minutes'
time Mrs. Pakenham and Mrs. Wake, from their respective windows, were able
to watch their widowed friend walking away across the heather with Sir
Basil beside her.

Neither spoke much as they wended their way along the little paths of
silvery sand that intersected the common. The day was clear, with a milky,
blue-streaked sky; the distant foldings of the hills were of a deep,
hyacinthine blue.

From time to time Sir Basil glanced at the face beside him, thoughtful to
sadness, its dusky fairness set in black, but attentive, as always, to the
sights and sounds of the well-loved country about her. He liked to watch
the quick glancing, the clear gazing, of her eyes; everything she looked at
became at once more significant to him--the tangle of tenacious roots that
thrust through the greensand soil of the lane they entered, the suave, gray
columns of the beeches above, the blurred mauves and russets of the woods,
the swift, awkward flight of a pheasant that crossed their way with a
creaking whir of wings, the amethyst stars of a bush of Michaelmas daisies,
showing over a whitewashed cottage wall, the far blue distance before them,
framed in the tracery of the beech-boughs. He knew that she loved it all
from the way she looked at it and, almost indignantly, as though against
some foolish threat, he felt himself asseverating, "It _is_ her home--she
knows it--the place she loves like that." And when they had made their wide
round, down the lane, up a grassy dell, into his park, where he had to show
her some trees that must come down; when they had skirted the park, along
its mossy, fern-grown wall, and under its overhanging branches, until, once
more, they were on the common and the white of Valerie's cottage glimmered
before them, he voiced this protest, saying to her, as he watched her eyes,
dwell on the dear little place, "You could never bear to leave all this for
good--even if, even if we let you; you know you couldn't."

Valerie looked round at him, and in his face, against its high background
of milk-streaked blue, she saw the embodiment of his words; it was that,
not the hyacinthine hills, not the beech-woods, not the heathery common,
not even the dear cottage, that she could not bear to leave for good. But
since this couldn't be said, she consented to the symbol of it that he put
before her, that "all this," and answered, as he had hoped, "No, indeed; I
couldn't think of leaving it all, for good."

IV

It was an icy, sunny day, and Imogen Upton and Jack Pennington were walking
up and down the gaunt wharf, not caring to take refuge from the cold in the
stifling waiting-rooms. The early morning sky was still pink. The waters of
the vast harbor were whitened by blocks and sheets of ice. The great city,
drawn delicately on the pink in white and pearl, marched its fantastic
ranges of "sky-scrapers"--an army of giants--down to the water's edge.
And, among all the rose and gold and white, the ocean-liner, a glittering
immensity of helpless strength, was being hauled and butted into her dock,
like some harpooned sea-monster, by a swarm of blunt-nosed, agile little
tugs.

Jack Pennington thought that he had never seen Imogen looking so
"wonderful" as on this morning. The occasion, to him, was brimming over
with significance. He had not expected to share it, but Imogen had spoken
with such sweetness of the help that he would give her if he could be with
her in her long, cold waiting, that, with touched delight, he found himself
in the position of a friend so trusted, so leaned upon, that he could
witness what there must be of pain and fear for her in this meeting of her
new life. The old life was with them both. Her black armed her in it, as it
were, made her valiant to meet the new. And for him that old life, the life
menaced, though so trivially, by the arriving presence, seemed embodied in
the free spaces of the great harbor, the soaring sky of frosty rose, the
grotesque splendor of the giant city, the glory, the ugliness of the
country he loved, the country that made giant-like, grotesque cities, and
that made Imogens.

She was the flower of it all--the flower and the so much more than flower.
He didn't care a fig, so he told himself, about the mere fact of her being
beautiful, finished, in her long black furs, her face so white, her hair so
gold under her little hat. She wasn't to be picked and placed high, above
the swarming ugliness. No, and that was why he cared for her when he had
ceased to care for so many pretty girls--her roots were deep; she shared
her loveliness; she gave; she opened; she did not shut away. She was the
promise for many rather than the guerdon of the few. Jack's democracy was
the ripe fruit of an ancestry of high endeavor and high responsibility. The
service of impersonal ends was in his blood, and no meaner task had ever
been asked of him or of a long line of forebears. He had never in his own
person experienced ugliness; it remained a picture, seen but not felt by
him, so that it was not difficult for him to see it with the eyes of faith
as glorified and uplifted. It constituted a splendid burden, an ennobling
duty, for those who possessed beauty, and without that grave and happy
right to serve, beauty itself would lose all meaning. He often talked about
democracy to Imogen. She understood what he felt about it more firmly, more
surely, than he himself did; for, where he sometimes suspected himself of
theory, she acted. She, too, rejoiced in the fundamental sameness of the
human family that banded it together in, essentially, the same great
adventure--the adventure of the soul.

Imogen understood; Imogen rejoiced; Imogen was bound on that adventure--not
only with him, but, and it was this that gave those wide wings to his
feeling for her, with _them_--with all the vast brotherhood of humanity.
Now and then, to be sure, faint echoes in her of her father, touches of
youthful assurance, youthful grandiloquence, stirred the young man's sense
of humor; but it was quickly quelled by an irradiating tenderness that
showed her limitations as symptoms of an influence that, in its foolish
aspects, he would not have had her too clearly recognize; her beautiful,
filial devotion more than compensated for her filial blindness--nay,
sanctified it; and her heavenly face had but to turn on him for him to
envelop all her little solemnities and importances in a comprehending
reverence. Jack thought Imogen's face very heavenly. He was an artist by
profession, as we have said, taking himself rather seriously, too, but the
artistic perception was so strongly colored by ethical and intellectual
preoccupations that the spontaneous satisfaction in the Eternal Now of mere
beauty was rarely his. Certainly he saw the flower-like texture of Imogen's
skin; the way in which the light azured its whiteness and slid upon its
child-like surfaces. He saw the long oval of the face, the firm and gentle
lips, drawn with a delicate amplitude, the broad hazel eyes set under
a level sweep of dark eyebrow and outlined, not shadowed, so clear, so
wide they were, by the dark lashes. But all the fresh loveliness of line,
surface, color, remained an intellectual appreciation; while what touched,
what penetrated, were the analogies she suggested, the lovely soul that the
lovely face vouched for. The oval of her face and the charming squaring
of her eyes, so candid, so unmysterious, made him think of a Botticelli
Madonna; and her long, narrow hands, with their square finger-tips, might
have been the hands of a Botticelli angel holding a votive offering of
fruit and flowers. His mind seldom rested in her beauty, passing at once
through it to what it expressed of purity, strength and serenity. It
expressed so much of these that he had never paused at the portals, as it
were, to feel the defects of her face. Imogen's nose was too small; neat
rather than beautiful. Her eyes, with the porcelain-like quality of their
white, the jewel-like color of their irises, were over-large; and when
she smiled, which she did often, though with more gentleness than gaiety,
she showed an over-spacious expanse of large white teeth. For the rest,
Imogen's figure was that of the typical well-groomed, well-trained,
American girl, long-limbed, slender, rounded; in her carriage a girlish
air of consciousness; the poise of her broad shoulders and slender hips
expressing at once hygienic and fashionable ideals that reproved slack
gaits and outlines. As they walked, as they talked, watching the slow
advance of the great steamer; as their eyes rested calmly and intelligently
on each other, one could see that the girl's relation to this dear friend
was untouched by any trace of coquetry and that his feeling for her, if
deep, was under most perfect control.

"It's over a year, now, since I saw mama," Imogen was saying, as they
turned again from a long scrutiny of the crowded decks--the distance was as
yet too great for individual recognition. "She didn't come over this summer
as usual,--poor dear, how bitterly she must regret that now, though it was
hardly her fault, papa and I fixed on our Western trip for the summer. It
seems a very long time to me."

"And to me," said Jack. "It's only a year since I came really to know you;
but how much longer it seems than that."

"It's strange that we should know each other so well and yet that you have
never seen my mother," said Imogen. "Is that she? No, she is not so tall.
Poor darling, how tired and sad she must be."

"You are tired and sad, too," said Jack.

"Ah, but I am young--youth can bear so much better. And, besides, I don't
think that my sadness would ever be like mama's. You see, in a way, I have
so much more in my life. I should never sit down in my sadness and let it
overwhelm me. I should use it, always. It is strange that grief should so
often make people selfish. It ought, rather, to open doors for us and give
us wider visions."

He was so sure that it had performed these offices for her, looking, as he
now looked, at her delicate profile, turned from him while she gazed toward
the ship, that he was barely conscious of the little tremor of amusement
that went through him for the triteness of her speech. Such triteness was
beautiful when it expressed such reality.

"I suppose that you will count for more, now, in your mother's life," he
said,--that Imogen should, seemingly, have counted for so little had been
the frequent subject of his indignant broodings. "She will make you her
object."

Imogen smiled a little. "Isn't it more likely that I shall make her mine?
one of mine? But you don't know mama yet. She is, in a way, very
lovely--but so much of a child. So much younger--it seems funny to say it,
but it's true--than I am."

"Littler," Jack amended, "not younger."

But Imogen, while accepting the amendment, wouldn't accept the negation.

"Both, I'm afraid," she sighed.

"Will she like it over here?" Jack mused more than questioned.

"Hardly, since she has always lived as little here as she could manage."

"Perhaps she will want to take you back to England," he surmised,
conscious, while he spoke the almost humorous words, of a very firm
determination that she shouldn't do so.

Imogen paused in her walk at this, fixing upon him eyes very grave indeed.
"Take me back to England? Do you really think that I would consent to that?
Surely you know me better, Jack?"

"I think I do. Only you might yield against your will, if she insisted."

"Surely you know me well enough to know that I would never yield against my
will, if I knew that my will was right. I might sacrifice a great deal for
mama--I am prepared to--but never that; Never," Imogen repeated. "There are
some things that one must not sacrifice. Her living in England is a whim;
my living in my own country is part of my religion."

"I know, of course, dear Imogen. But," Jack was argumentative, "as to
sacrifice, say that it was asked of you, by right. Say, for instance, that
you married a man who had to take you out of your own country?"

She smiled a little at the stupid surmise. "That hardly applies. Besides, I
would never marry a man who was not one of my own people, who was not a
part--as I am a part--of the Whole I live for. My life is here, all its
meaning is here--you know it--just as yours is."

"I love to know it--I was only teasing you."

He loved to know it, of course. Yet, while it answered to all his own
theories that the person should be so much less to her than the idea the
person lived for, he couldn't but feel at times, with a rueful sense of
unworthiness, that this rare capacity in her might apply in most unwelcome
fashion to his own case. In Jack, the deep wells of feeling and emotion
were barred and bolted over by a whole complicated system of reticences;
by a careful sense of responsibility, not only toward others, but toward
himself; by a disciplined self-control that was a second nature. But, he
could see it well enough, if such, deep wells there were in Imogen, they,
as yet, were in no need of barring and bolting. Her eyes could show a quiet
acceptance of homage, a placid conviction of power, a tender sympathy, but
the depth and trouble of emotion was not yet in them. He often suspected
that he was nearer to her when he talked to her of causes than when he
ventured, now and then, to talk about his feelings. There was always the
uncomfortable surmise that the man who could offer a more equipped faculty
for the adventure of the soul, might altogether outdistance him with
Imogen. By any emotion, any appeal or passion that he might show, she would
remain, so his intuition at moments told him, quite unbiased; while she
weighed simply worth against worth, and weight--in the sense of strength of
soul--against weight. And it was this intuition that made self-control and
reticence easier than they might otherwise have been. His theories might
assure him that such integrity of purpose was magnificent; his manly
common-sense told him that in a wife one wanted to be sure of the taint of
personal preference; so that, while he knew that he would never need to
weigh Imogen's worth against anybody else's, he watched and waited until
some unawakened capacity in her should be able happily to respond to the
more human aspects of life. Meanwhile the steamer had softly glided into
the dock and the two young people at last descried upon the crowded decks
the tall, familiar figure of Eddy Upton, like Imogen in his fairness,
clearness, but with a more masculine jut of nose and chin, sharper lines of
brow and cheek and lip. And beside Eddy--Jack hardly needed the controlled
quiet of Imogen's "There's mama" to identify the figure in black.

She leaned there, high and far, on the deck of the great steamer that
loomed above their heads, almost ominous in its gigantic bulk and darkness;
she leaned there against the rosy sky, her face intent, searching, bent
upon the fluttering, shouting throng beneath; and for Jack, in this first
impression of her, before she had yet found Imogen, there was something
pathetic in the earnestness of her searching gaze, something that softened
the rigors of his disapprobation. But, already, too, he fancied that he
caught the expected note of the frivolous in the outline of her fur-lined
coat, in the grace of her little hat.

Still she sought, her face pale and grave, while, with an imperceptible
movement, the steamer glided forward, and now, as Imogen raised her muff
in a long, steady wave, her eyes at last found her daughter and, smiling,
smiling eagerly down upon them, she leaned far over the deck to wave her
answer. She put her hand on her son's arm, pointing them out to him, and
Eddy, also finding them, smiled too, but with his rather cool kindness,
raising his hat and giving Jack a recognizing nod. It was then as if he
introduced Jack. Jack saw her question, saw him assent, and her smile went
from Imogen to him enveloping him with its mild radiance.

"She is very lovely, your mother, as you say," Jack commented, feeling a
little breathless over this silent meeting of forces that he must think of
as hostile, and finding nothing better to say.

Imogen, who had continued steadily to wave her muff, welcoming, but for her
part unsmiling, answered, "Yes."

"I hope that she won't mind my being here, in the way, after a fashion,"
said Jack.

"She won't mind," said Imogen.

He knew the significance of her voice; displeasure was in its gentleness,
a quiet endurance of distress. It struck him then, in a moment, that it
was rather out of place for Mrs. Upton to smile so radiantly at such a
home-coming. Not that the smile had been a gay one. It had shone out after
her search for her daughter's face; for the finding of it and for him it
had continued to shine. It was like sunlight on a sad white day of mist; it
did not dispel mournfulness, it seemed only to irradiate it. But--to have
smiled at all. With Imogen's eyes he saw, suddenly, that tears would have
been the more appropriate greeting and, in looking back at the girl once
more, he saw that her own, as if in vicarious atonement, were running down
her cheeks. She, then, felt a doubled suffering and his heart hardened
against the woman who had caused it.

The two travelers had disappeared and the decks were filled with the
jostling hurry of final departure. Jack and Imogen moved to take their
places by the long gangway that slanted up from the dock.

He said nothing to her of her tears, silent before this subtle grief;
perhaps, for all his love and sympathy, a little disconcerted by its
demonstration, and it was Imogen who spoke, murmuring, as they stood
together, looking up, "Poor, poor papa."

Yes, that had been the hurt, to see her dead put aside, almost forgotten,
in the mother's over-facile smile.

The passengers came trooping down the gangway, with an odd buoyancy of step
caused by the steep incline, and Jack, for all his expectancy, had eyes,
appreciative and critical, for the procession of his country-people. Stout,
short men, embodying purely economic functions, with rudimentary features,
slightly embossed, as it were, upon pouch-like faces. Thin, young men,
whose lean countenances had somewhat the aspect of steely machinery, apt
for swift, ruthless, utilitarian processes. Bloodless old men, many of
whom looked like withered, weary children adorned with whitened hair.
The average manhood of America, with its general air of cheap and hasty
growth, but varied here and there by a higher type; an athletic collegian,
auspiciously Grecian in length of limb, width of brow, deep placidity
of eye; varied by a massive senatorial head or so, tolerant, humorous,
sagacious; varied by a stalwart Westerner, and by the weedier scholar,
sensitive, self-conscious, too much of the spiritual and too little of the
animal in the meager body and over-intelligent face.

There was a certain discrepancy, in dress and bodily well-being, between
the feminine and the masculine portion of the procession; many of the heavy
matrons, wide-hipped, well-corseted, benignant and commanding of mien, were
ominously suggestive, followed as they were by their fragile husbands,
of the female spider and her doomed, inferior, though necessary, mate.
The young girls of the happier type resembled Imogen Upton in grace, in
strength, in calm and in assurance; the less fortunate were sharp, sallow,
anxious-eyed; and the children were either rosy, well-mannered, and
confident, or ill-mannered, over-mature, but also, always, confident.

Highly equipped with every graceful quality of his race, not a touch of the
male spider about him, Eddy's head appeared at last, proud, delicate and
strong. His mother, carrying a small dog, was on his arm, and, as she
emerged before the eyes that watched for her, she was smiling again at
something that Eddy had said to her. Then her eyes found them, Jack and
Imogen, so near now, sentinels before the old life, that her smile, her
aspect, her very loveliness, seemed to menace, and Jack felt that she
caught a new gravity from the stern gentleness of Imogen's gaze; that
she adjusted her features to meet it; that, with a little shock, she
recognized the traces of weeping on her daughter's face and saw, in his own
intentionally hardened look, that she had tuned herself to a wrong pitch
and had been, all unconsciously, jarring.

He couldn't but own that her readjustment, if readjustment it was, was very
beautifully done. Tears rose in her eyes, too. He saw, as she neared them,
that her face was pale and weary; it looked ever so gently, ever so sadly,
perhaps almost timidly, at her daughter, and as she came to them she put
out her hand to Imogen, laid hold on her and held her without speaking
while they all moved away together.

The tears of quick sympathy had risen to Jack's own eyes and he stood apart
while the mother and daughter kissed. After that, and when they had gone
on a little before him and Eddy, Mrs. Upton turned to him, and if she
readjusted herself she didn't, as it were, retract, for the smile again
rested on him while Eddy presented him to her. He saw then that she had
suffered, though with a suffering different from any that he would have
thought of as obvious. How or what she had suffered he could not tell, but
the pale, weary features, for all their smile, reassured him. She wasn't,
at all events, a heartless, a flippant woman.

Eddy and Mrs. Upton's maid remained behind to do battle with the
custom-house, and Jack, with Imogen and her mother, got into the capacious
cab that was waiting for them.

The streets in this mean quarter were deep in mud. The snow everywhere had
been trampled into liquid blackness, and the gaunt horses that galloped
along the wharfs dragging noisy vans and carts were splashed all over. It
might have been some sordid quarter of an Italian town that they drove
through, so oddly foreign were the disheveled houses, their predominant
color a heavy, glaring red. Men in white uniforms were shoveling snow from
the pavements. The many negro countenances in the hurrying crowds showed
blue tints in the bitter air. Coming suddenly to a wide, mean avenue, when
the carriage lurched and swayed on the street-car tracks, they heard,
mingled in an inconceivably ugly uproar, the crash and whine of the
cable-cars about them, and the thunder of the elevated-railway above their
heads.

Jack, sensitive to others' impressions, wondered if this tumultuous
ugliness made more dreary to Mrs. Upton the dreary circumstances of her
home-coming. There was no mitigation of dreariness to be hoped for from
Imogen, who was probably absorbed in her own bitter reflections. She gazed
steadily out of the window, replying only with quiet monosyllables to her
mother's tentative questions; her face keeping its look of endurance. One
could infer from it that had she not so controlled herself she must have
wept, and sitting before the mother and daughter Jack felt much awkwardness
in his position. If their meeting were not to be one with more conventional
surface he really ought not to have been invited to share it. Imogen, poor
darling, had all his sympathy; she hadn't reckoned with the difficulties;
she hadn't reckoned with that hurting smile, with the sharp reawakening of
the vicarious sense of wrong; but, all the same, before her look, her
silence, he could but feel for her mother, and feel, too, a keener
discomfort from the fact that his inopportune presence must make Mrs.
Upton's discomfort the greater.

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