A Fountain Sealed

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Mrs. Upton stroked her tiny dog, who, fulfilling all Jack's conceptions of
costly frivolity, was wrapped in a well-cut coat, in spite of which he was
shivering, from excitement as much as from cold, and her bright, soft gaze
went from him to Imogen. She didn't acquiesce for long in the silence.
Leaning forward to him presently she began to ask him questions about
Boston, the dear old great-aunt; to make comments, some reminiscent,
some interrogative, upon the scenes they passed through; to lead him so
tactfully into talk that he found himself answering and assenting almost
as fluently as if Imogen in her corner had not kept those large, sad eyes
fixed on the passing houses. So mercifully did her interest and her ease
lift him from discomfort that, with a sharp twinge of self-reproach, he
more than once asked himself if Imogen found something a little disloyal
in his willingness to be helped. One couldn't, all the same, remain at
the dreadful depth where her silence plunged them; such depths were too
intimate. Mrs. Upton had felt that. It was because she was not intimate
that she smiled upon him; it was because she intended to hold them both
firmly on the surface that she was so kind. He watched her face with
wonder, and a little fear, for which he was angry with himself. He noted
the three _grains de beaute_ and the smile that seemed to break high on
her cheek, in a small nick, like that on the cheek of a Japanese doll.
She frightened him, made him feel shy, yet made him feel at ease, too,
as though her own were contagious; and his impression of her was softly
permeated with the breath of violets. Jack disapproved of perfumes; but he
really couldn't tell whether it wasn't Mrs. Upton's gaze only, the sweet
oddity of her smile, that, by some trick of association, suggested the
faint haze of fragrance.

They reached the long, far sweep of Fifth Avenue, piled high with
snow--dazzling in white, blue, gold--on either side, and they turned
presently into a street of brownstone houses, houses pleasant, peaceful,
with an air of happy domesticity.

Mrs. Upton's eyes, while the cab advanced with many jolts among the heaps
of snow, fixed themselves on one of these houses, and Jack fancied that he
saw in her glance a whole army of alarmed memories forcibly beaten back.
Here she had come as a bride and from here, not three weeks ago, her dead
husband had gone with only his children beside him. Now, if ever, she
should feel remorse. Whether she did or not he could not tell, but the eyes
with which she greeted her old home were not happy.

Imogen, as they alighted, spoke at last, asking him to stay to lunch. He
recognized magnanimity in her glance. He had seemed to ignore her hurt, and
she forgave him, understanding his helplessness. But though her mother
seconded her invitation with, "Do, you must be so tired and hungry, after
all these hours," Jack excused himself. Already he thought, a woman with
such a manner as Mrs. Upton's--if manner were indeed the word for such a
gliding simplicity--must wonder what in the name of heaven he did there.
She was simple, she was gliding; but she was not near.

"May I come in soon and see you?" he said to Imogen while they paused at
the foot of the stone steps. And, with at last her own smile, sad but
sweet, for him, she answered, "As soon as you will, dear Jack. You know how
much of strength and comfort you mean to me."

V

Jack, however, did not go for three or four days, giving them plenty of
time, as he told himself, to get used to each other's excesses or lacks of
grief. And as he waited for Imogen in the long drawing-room that had been
the setting of so many of their communings, he wondered what adjustment the
mother and daughter had come to.

The aspect of the drawing-room was unchanged; changelessness had always
been for him its characteristic mark; in essentials, he felt sure, it had
not changed since the days of old Mrs. Upton, the present Mrs. Upton's long
deceased mother-in-law. Only a touch here and there showed the passage of
time. It was continuous with the dining-room, so that it was but one long
room that crossed all the depth of the house, tall windows at the back,
heavily draped, echoing dimly the windows of the front that looked out
upon the snowy, glittering street. The inner half could be shut away by
folding-doors, and its highly polished sideboard, chairs, table, a silver
epergne towering upon it, glimmered in a dusky element that relegated
it, when not illuminated for use, to a mere ghostly decorativeness.
By contrast, the drawing-room was vivid. Its fringed and buttoned
furniture,--crimson brocade set in a dark carved wood, the dangling lusters
of the huge chandelier, the elaborate Sevres vases on the mantelpiece,
flanking a bronze clock portentously gloomy, expressed old Mrs. Upton's
richly solid ideals; but these permanent uglinesses distressed Jack less
than the pompous and complacent taste of the later additions. A pretentious
cabinet of late Italian Renaissance work stood in a corner; the dark marble
mantelpiece, that looked like a sarcophagus, was incongruously draped with
an embroidered Italian cope, and a pseudo-Correggio Madonna, encompassed
with a wilderness of gilt frame, smiled a pseudo-smile from the embossed
paper of the walls. It was one of Jack's little trials to hear Imogen refer
to this trophy with placid conviction.

Yet, for all its solemn stupidity, the room was not altogether unpleasing;
it signified something, were it only an indifference to fashion, It was,
funnily, almost Spartan, for all the carving, the cushioning, the crimson,
so little concession did it make to other people's standards or to small,
happy minor uses. Mr. Upton and his daughter had not changed it because
they had other things to think of; and they thought of these things not in
the drawing-room but in the large library up-stairs. There one could find
the personal touches, that, but for the cope, the cabinet, the Correggio,
were lacking below. There the many photographs from the Italian primitives,
the many gracious Donatello and Delia Robbia bas-reliefs, expressed
something of Imogen, too, though Jack always felt that Imogen's esthetic;
side expressed what was not very essential in her.

While he waited now, he had paused at last before two portraits. He had
often so paused while waiting for Imogen. To-night it was with a new
curiosity.

They hung opposite the Correggio and on either side of the great mirror
that rose from the mantelpiece to the cornice. One was of a young man
dressed in the fashion of twenty-five years before, dressed with a rather
self-conscious negligence. He was pale, earnest, handsome, though his nose
was too small and his eyes too large. A touch of the histrionic was in
his attitude, in his dark hair, tossed carelessly, in the unnecessarily
weighty and steady look of his dark eyes, even in the slight smile of
his firm, full lips, a smile too well-adapted, as it were, to the needs
of any interlocutor. Beneath his arm was a book; a long, distinguished
hand hanging slackly. Jack turned away with a familiar impatience. In
twenty-five years Mr. Upton had changed very little. It was much the same
face that he had known; in especial, the slack, self-conscious hand, the
smile--always so much more for himself than for you--were familiar. The
hand, the necktie, the smile, so deep, so dark, so empty, were all, Jack
was inclined to suspect, that there had ever been of Mr. Upton.

The other portrait, painted with the sleek convention of that earlier
epoch, was of a woman in a ball-dress. The portrait was by a French master
and under his brush the sitter had taken on the look of a Feuillet heroine.
She was gay, languid, sentimental, and extraordinarily pretty. Her hair was
dressed in a bygone fashion, drawn smoothly up from the little ears, coiled
high and falling across her forehead in a light, straight fringe. Her
wonderful white shoulders rose from a wonderfully low white bodice; a
bracelet of emeralds was on her arm, a spray of jasmine in her fingers;
she was evidently a girl, yet in her apparel was a delicate splendor, in
her gaze a candid assurance, that marked her as an American girl. And she
expressed charmingly, with sincerity as it were, a frivolous convention.
This was Miss Cray, a year or so before her marriage with Mr. Upton. The
portrait had been painted in Paris, where, orphaned, lovely, but not
largely dowered, she had, under the wing of an aunt domiciled in France
for many years and bearing one of its oldest names, failed to make the
brilliant match that had been hoped for her. This touch of France in
girlhood echoed an earlier impress. Imogen had told him that her mother
had been educated for some years in a French convent, deposited there
by pleasure-loving parents during European wanderings, and Imogen had
intimated that her mother's frequent returns to her native land had never
quite effaced alien and regrettable points of view. Before this portrait,
Jack was accustomed, not to impatience, but to a gaze of rather ironic
comprehension. It had always explained to him so much. But to-night he
found himself looking at it with an intentness in which was a touched
curiosity; in which, also, and once more he was vexed with himself for
feeling it, was an anxiety, almost a fear. Of course it hadn't been like,
even then, he was surer than ever of that to-night, with his memory of the
pale face smiling down at him and at Imogen from the deck of the great
steamer. The painter had seen the mask only; even then there had been more
to see. And sure, as he had never been before, of all that there must have
been besides to see, he wondered with a new wonder how she had come to
marry Mr. Upton.

He glanced back at him. Handsome? Yes. Distinguished? Yes; there was no
trace of the shoddy in his spiritual histrionics. He had been fired by
love, no doubt, far beyond his own chill complacency. Such a butterfly
girl, falling with, perhaps, bruised wings from the high, hard glare of
worldly ambitions, more of others for her than her own for herself--of that
he felt, also quite newly sure to-night--such a girl had thought Mr. Upton,
no doubt, a very noble creature and herself happy and fortunate. And she
had been very young.

He was still looking up at Miss Cray when Imogen came in. He felt sure,
from his first glance at her, that nothing had happened, during the
interval of his abstention, to deepen her distress. In her falling and
folding black she was serene and the look of untroubled force he knew so
well was in her eyes. She had taken the measure of the grown-up butterfly
and found it easy of management. He felt with relief that the mother could
have threatened none of the things they held dear. And, indeed, in his
imagination, her spirit seemed to flutter over them in the solid, solemn
room, reassuring through its very lightness and purposelessness.

"I am so glad to see you," Imogen said, after she had shaken his hand and
they had seated themselves on the sofa that stretched along the wall under
the Correggio. "I have been sorry about the other day."

"Oh!" he answered vaguely, not quite sure for what the regret was.

"I ought to have mastered myself; been more able to play the trivial part,
as you did; that was such real kindness in you, Jack, dear. I couldn't have
pretended gaiety, but I didn't intend to cast a gloom. It only became that,
I suppose, when I was--so hurt."

He understood now. "By there not being gloom enough?"

"If you like to put it so. To see her smile like that!"

Jack was sorry for her, yet, at the same time, sorry for the butterfly.

"Yes, I know how you must have felt. But, it was natural, you know. One
smiles involuntarily at a meeting, however sad its background. I believe
that _you_ would have smiled if she hadn't."

Imogen's clear eyes were upon him while he thus shared with her his sense
of mitigations and she answered without a pause: "Yes, I could have smiled
at her. That would have been different."

"You mean--that you had a right to smile?"

"I can't see how she _could_," said Imogen in a low voice, not answering
his question; thinking, probably, that it answered itself. And she went on:
"I was ready, you know, to help her to bear it all, with my whole strength;
but, and it is that that still hurts me so, she doesn't seem to know that
she needs help. She doesn't seem to be bearing anything."

Jack was silent, feeling here that they skirted too closely ground upon
which, with Imogen, he never ventured. He had brought from his study of the
portraits a keener sense of how much Mrs. Upton had to bear no longer.

"But," Imogen continued, oddly echoing his own sense of deeper insights, "I
already understand her so much better than I've ever done. I've never come
so near. Never seen so clearly how little there is to see. She's still
essentially that, you know," and she pointed to the French portrait that,
with softly, prettily mournful eyes, gazed out at them.

"The butterfly thing," Jack suggested rather than acquiesced.

"The butterfly thing," she accepted.

But Jack went on: "Not only that, though. There is, I'm very sure, more to
see. She is so--so sensible."

"Sensible?" again Imogen accepted. "Well, isn't that portrait sensible?
Doesn't that lovely, luxurious girl see and want all the happy, the easy
things of life? It is sensible, of course, clearly to know what they are,
and firmly to make for them. That's just what I recognize now in her, that
all she wants is to make things easy, to _glisser_."

"Yes, I can believe that," he murmured, a little dazed by her clear
decisiveness; he often felt Imogen to be so much more clear-sighted, so
much more clever than himself when it came to judgments and insights, that
he could only at the moment acquiesce, through helplessness. "I suppose
that is the essential--the desire of ease."

"And it hurts you that I should be able to see it, to say it, of my
mother." Her eyes, with no hardness, no reproach, probed him, too. She
almost made him feel unworthy of the trust she showed him.

"No," he said, smiling at her, "because I know that it's only to a friend
who so understands you, who so cares for all that comes into your life."

"Only to such a friend, indeed," she returned gently.

"Have they been hard, these days?" he asked her, atoning to himself for the
momentary shrinking that she had detected.

"Yes, they have," she answered, "and the more so from my seeing all her
efforts to keep them soft; as if it was ease _I_ wanted! But I have faced
it all."

"What else has there been to face?"

She said nothing for some moments, looking at him with a thoughtful
openness that, he felt, was almost marital in its sharing of silence.

"She's against everything, everything," she said at last.

"You mean in the way we feared?--that she'll try to change things?"

"She'll not seem to try. She'll seem to accept. But she's against my
country; against my life; against me."

"Well, if she accepts, or seems to, that will make it easy for you. There
will be nothing to fight, to oppose."

"Don't use her word, Jack. She will make it easy on the surface; but it's
that that will be so hard for me to bear; the surface ease over the hidden
discord."

"You may resolve the discord. Give her time to grow her roots. How can you
expect anything but effort now, in this soil that she can't but associate
with mistakes and sorrows?"

"The mistakes and sorrows were in her, not in the soil," said Imogen; "but
don't think that though I find it hard, I don't face it; don't think that
through it all I haven't my faith. That is just what I am going to do: give
her time, and help her to grow with all the strength and love there is in
me."

Something naughty, something rebellious and dissatisfied in him was vaguely
stirring and muttering; he feared that she might see into him again and
give it a name, although he could only have given it the old name of
a humorous impatience with her assured rightness. Really, she was so
over-right that she almost irked and irritated him, dear and beloved as she
was. One could only call it over-rightness, for wasn't what she said the
simple truth, just as he had always seen it, just as she had always known
that, with her, he saw it? She had this queer, light burden suddenly on her
hands, so much more of a burden for being so light, and if her own weight
and wisdom became a little too emphatic in dealing with it, how could he
reproach her? He didn't reproach her, of course; but he was afraid lest she
should see that he found her, well, a little funny.

"What does she do with herself?" he asked, turning hastily from his
consciousness of amusement.

Imogen's pearly face, bent on him with such confidence, made him, once
more, ashamed of himself.

"She has seen a good many of her friends. We have had quite a stream of
fashionable, furbelowed dames trooping up the steps; very few of them
people that papa and I cared to keep in touch with; you know his dislike
for the merely pleasure-seeking side of life. And she has seen the dear
Delancy Pottses, too, and was very nice to them, one of the cases of
seeming to accept; I saw well enough that they were no more to her than
quaint insects she must do her duty by. And she has been very busy with
business, closeted every day with Mr. Haliwell. And she takes a walk with
me when I can spare the time, and for the rest of the day she sits in her
room dressed in a wonderful tea-gown and reads French memoirs, just as she
used always to do."

Jack was smiling, amused, now, in no way that needed hiding, by her smooth
flow of description. "You must take her down to the girls' club some day,"
he suggested, "and to see your cripples and all the rest of it. Get her
interested, you know; give her something else to think of besides French
memoirs."

"Indeed, I'm going to try to. Though among my girls I'm not sure that she
would be a very wise experiment. Such an _ondulee_, _parfumee_,
polished person with such fashionable mourning would be, perhaps, a little
resented."

"You dress very charmingly, yourself, my dear Imogen."

"Oh, but quite differently. Mamma's is fashion at its very flower of subtle
discretion. My clothes, why, they are of any time you will." She swept
aside her wing-like sleeves to show the Madonna-like lines of her dress. "A
factory girl could wear just the same shape if she wanted to."

"And she doesn't want to, foolish girl? She wants to wear your mother's
kind instead?"

"She would dimly recognize it as the unattainable perfection of what she
wants. It would pierce."

"Make for envy, you think?"

"Well, I can't see that she would do them any _good_," said Imogen, now
altogether in her lighter, happier mood, "but since they may do _her_ good
I must, I think, take her there some day."

"And am I to do her some good? Am I to see her to-night?" Jack asked,
feeling that though her humor a little jarred on him he could do nothing
better than echo it. Imogen, now, had one of her frankest, prettiest looks.

"Do you know, she is almost too discreet, poor dear," she said. "She wants
me to see that she perfectly understands and sympathizes with the American
freedom as to friendships between men and women, so that she vacates
the drawing-room for my people just as a farmer's wife would do for her
daughter's young men. She hasn't asked me even a question about you, Jack!"

Her gaiety so lifted and warmed him that he was prompted to say that Mrs.
Upton would have to, very soon, if the answer to a certain question that he
wanted to ask Imogen were what he hoped for. But the jocund atmosphere of
their talk seemed unfit for such a grave allusion and he repressed the
sally.

VI

When Jack went away, after tea, Imogen remained sitting on the sofa,
looking up from time to time at the two portraits, while thoughts, quiet
and mournful, but not distressing, passed through her mind. An interview
with Jack usually left her lapped about with a warm sense of security; she
couldn't feel desolate, even with the greatness of her loss so upon her,
when such devotion surrounded her. One deep need of her was gone, but
another was there. Life, as she felt it, would have little meaning for her
if it had not brought to her deep needs that she, and she alone, could
satisfy. With Jack's devotion and Jack's need to sustain her, it wasn't
difficult to bear with a butterfly. One had only to stand serenely in one's
place and watch it hover. It was, after all, as if she had strung herself
to an attitude of strength only to find that no weight was to come crushing
down upon her. The pain was that of feeling her mother so light.

"Poor papa," Imogen murmured more than once, as she gazed up into the
steady eyes; "what a fate it was for you--to be hurt all your life by a
butterfly." But he had been far, far too big to let it spoil anything. He
turned all pain to spiritual uses. What sorrow there was had always been,
most of all, for her.

And then--and here was the balm that had perfumed all her grief with
its sacred aroma--she, Imogen, had been there to fill the emptiness for
him. She had always been there, it seemed to her, as, in her quiet, sad
retrospect, she looked back, now, to the very beginnings of consciousness.
From the first she had felt that her place was by his side; that, together
they stood for something and against somebody. In this very room, so
unchanged--she could even remember the same dull thump of the bronze clock,
the blazing fire, the crimson curtains drawn on a snowy street,--had
happened the earliest of the episodes that her memory recalled as having
so placed her, so defined her attitude, even for her almost babyish
apprehension. She had brought down her dolls from her nursery, after tea,
and ranged them on the sofa, while her father walked up and down the room,
his hands in his pockets, his head thrown back, reciting something to
himself, some poem, or stately fragment of antique oratory. He paused now
and then as he passed her and laid his hand upon her head and smiled down
at her. Then the lovely lady of the portrait,--just like the portrait
in Imogen's recollection,--had come, all in white, with wonderful white
shoulders, holding a fan and long white gloves in her hand, and, looking
round from her dolls, small Imogen had known in a moment that displeasure
was in the air. "You are not dressed!" Those had been her mother's first
words as she paused on the threshold; and then, echoing her father's words
with amazement and anger, "You are not coming!"

The dialogue that followed, vivid on her mother's side as sparks struck
from steel, mild as milk on her father's, had been lost upon her; but
through it all she had felt that he must be right, in his gentleness, and
that she, in her vividness, must be wrong. She felt that for herself, even
before, turning as if from an unseemly contest, her father said, looking
down at her with a smile that had a twinge of tension, "_You_ would rather
go and see sick and sorry people who wanted you, than the selfish, the
foolish, the overfed,--wouldn't you, beautiful little one?"

She had answered quickly, "Yes, papa," and had kept her eyes on him, not
looking at her mother, knowing in her childish soul that in so answering,
so looking, she shared some triumph with him.

"I'll say you're suddenly ill, then?" had come her mother's voice, but with
a deadened note, as though she knew herself defeated.

"Lie? No. I must ask you, Valerie, never to lie for me. Say the truth, that
I must go to a friend who needs me; the truth won't hurt them."

"But it's unbelievable, your breaking a dinner engagement, at the last
hour, for such a reason," the wife had said.

"Unbelievable, I've no doubt, to the foolish, the selfish, the over-fed.
Social conventions and social ideals will always go down for me, Valerie,
before realities, such realities as brotherhood and the need of a lonely
human soul."

While he spoke he had lifted, gently, Imogen's long, fair curls, and
smoothed her head, his eyes still holding her eyes, and when her mother
turned sharply and swept out of the room, the sense of united triumph
had made him bend down to her and made her stretch her arms tip to him,
so that, in their long embrace, he seemed to consecrate her to those
"realities" that the pretty, foolish mother flouted. That had been her
initiation and her consecration.

After that, it could not have been many years after, though she had brought
to it a far more understanding observation, the next scene that came up for
her was a wrangle at lunch one day, over the Delancy Pottses--if wrangle it
could be called when one was so light and the other so softly stern. Imogen
by this time had been old enough to know for what the Pottses counted. They
were discoveries of her father's, Mr. Potts a valuable henchman in that
fight for realities to which her father's life was dedicated. Mr. Potts
wrote articles in ethical reviews about her father's books--they never
seemed to be noticed anywhere else--and about his many projects for reform
and philanthropy. Both he and Mrs. Potts adored her father. He lent them,
indeed, all their significance; they were there, as it were, only for
the purpose of crystallizing around his magnetic center. And of these
good people her mother had said, in her crisp, merry voice, "I hate
'em,"--disposing of the whole question of value, flipping the Pottses away
into space, as it were, and separating herself from any interest in them.
Even then little Imogen had comprehendingly shared her father's still
indignation for such levity. Hate the excellent Pottses, who wrote so
beautifully of her father's books, so worshiped all that he was and did,
so tenderly cherished her small self? Imogen felt the old reprobation as
sharply as ever, though the Pottses had become, to her mature insight,
rather burdensome, the poor, good, dull, pretentious dears, and would be
more so, now that their only brilliant function, that of punctually,
coruscatingly, and in the public press, adoring her father, had been taken
from them. One need have no illusion as to the quality of their note;
it lacked distinction, serving only, in its unmodulated vehemence, the
drum-like purpose of calling attention to great matters, of reverberating,
so one hoped, through lethargic consciousness.

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