Jack listened to the bantering colloquy. This man, so hard, yet so kindly, so innocent, yet so mature, was making him feel by every tone, gesture, glance, oddly boyish and unformed. He was quite sure that he himself was a great deal cleverer, a great deal more conscious, than Sir Basil; but these advantages somehow a.s.sumed the aspect of schoolboy badges of good conduct beside a grown-up standard. And, as he listened, he began to understand far more deeply all sorts of things about Valerie; to see what vacancies she had had to put up with, to see what fullness she must have missed. And he began to understand what Imogen, Ca.s.sandra-like, had declared, that the unseasonable fragrance of devotions hovered about her widowed mother; to remember the ominous "Wait and see."

It showed how far he had traveled when he could recall these words with impatience: could answer them with: "Well, what of it? Doesn't she deserve some compensation?"--could quietly place Sir Basil as a no longer hopeless adorer and feel a thrill of satisfaction, in the realization. Yes, sitting here here in the house of mourning he could think these things.

But if he was so wide, so tolerant, the very expansion of his sympathies brought them a finer sensitiveness. Only a tendril-like fineness could penetrate the complexities of that deeper vision. He began to think of Imogen, and with a new pity, a new tenderness. How she would be hurt, and how, more than all, she would be hurt by seeing that he, while understanding, while sympathizing, should, helplessly, inevitably, be glad that Sir Basil had come. Poor Imogen,--and poor himself; for where did he stand among all these shiftings of the scene? He, too, knew the drifting loneliness and desolation, and though his heart ached for the old nearness he could not put out his hand to her nor take a step toward her. In himself, in her, was the change, or the mere fate, that held them parted.

The wrench had come slowly upon them, but, while he ached with the pain of it, he could already look upon it as accomplished. Only one question remained to be asked:--Would nothing, no change, no fate, draw them again together?

For all answer a deep, settled sadness descended upon him.

Sir Basil took himself off before Mrs. Wake seemed to think it tactful to depart, and since, soon after, she too went, Jack and Valerie were left alone together.

She turned her bright, soft eyes upon the young man and he recognized in them the unseeing quality that he had found in Sir Basil's--that happy preoccupation with inner gladness. She made him think of the bird alighted to sing on the swaying blade; and she made him think of a fountain released from winter and springing through sunlight in a murmur and sparkle of ecstasy. She was young, very young; he almost felt her as young in her gladness as he in his loneliness and pain. Smiling a trifle nervously, he said that he was glad, at last, to see something of her old life. "Of your real life," he added.

"My real life?" she repeated, and her look became more aware of him.

"Yes. Of course, in a sense, all this is something outlived, cast aside, for you. You've only taken it up for a bit while you felt that it had a claim upon you; but, once you have settled things, you would,--you would leave us, of course," said Jack, still smiling.

She was thinking of him now, no longer of herself and of Sir Basil, and perhaps, as she looked at him, at the thin brown face, the light, deep eyes, she guessed at a stir of tears under the smile. It was then as if the fountain sank from its own happy solitude and became a running brook of sweetness, sad, yet merry. She didn't contradict him. She was sorry that she couldn't, yet glad that his statement should be so obviously true.

"You mean that I'll go back to my little Surrey cottage, when I settle things?" she said. "Perhaps, yes. And you will miss me? I will miss you too, dear Jack. But we will often see each other. And then it may take a long time to settle all you young people."

Her confidence so startled him, so touched him with pity for its blindness, that, swiftly, he took refuge in ambiguity.

"Oh, you'll settle us!" he said, wondering in what that settling would consist, wondering what would happen if Imogen, definitely casting him off, to put the final settling in that form, were left on her mother's hands.

She would have to settle Imogen in America and what, in the meanwhile, would become of her "real" life?

But from the mother's confidence, her radiance, that accepted his speech in its happiest meaning, he guessed that she didn't foresee such a contingency; he even guessed that, were she brought face to face with it, she wouldn't accept its unsettling of her own joy as final. The fountain was too strong to heed such obstacles. It would find its way to the sunlight. Imogen, in time, would have to accept a step-father.

XV

Jack did not witness the revelation to Imogen of the ominous arrival, but from her demeanor at lunch next day he could guess at how it had impressed her. He felt in her an intense, a guarded, excitement, and knew that the news had fallen upon her with a tingling concussion. The sound of the thunder-bolt must reverberate all the louder in Imogen's ears from her consciousness that to Mary's it was soundless, Mary, who had been the only spectator of its falling. Her mother, too, was unconscious of such reverberations, so that it must seem to her a ghost-like subjective warning, putting into audible form all her old hauntings.

That she at once sought in him evidences of the same experience, Jack felt, and all through the early lunch, where they a.s.sembled prior to his departure with the two girls for the theater, he avoided meeting Imogen's eyes. He was too sure that she felt their mutual knowledge as a bond over the recent chasm. The knowledge in his own eyes was far too deep for him to allow her to wade into it; she would simply drown. He was rather ashamed of himself, but he resolutely feigned a cheerful unconsciousness.

"You are going with your friends, later?" he asked Valerie, who, he was quite sure, also feigning something, said that since Imogen and Mary dressed each other so well, and since he would be there to see that every detail was right, she, with the Pakenhams and Sir Basil, would get her impression from the stalls. Afterward, they would all meet here for tea.

"It was a surprise, you know, their coming," Imogen put in suddenly, from her end of the table, fixing strangely sparkling eyes upon Jack.

"No," said her mother, in tones of leisurely correction, "I expected the Pakenhams, as I told you."

"Oh, yes; it was only Sir Basil's surprise. You didn't expect him. Does he like playing surprises on people, mama?"

"I don't know that he does."

"He only plays them on you."

"I knew that he was coming, at some time."

"Ah, but you didn't tell me that; it was, in the main, _my_ surprise, then; but not so soon, I suppose."

"So soon? So soon for what?"

Imogen, at this, allowed her badly adjusted mask of lightness to fall and a sudden solemnity overspread her features.

"Don't you feel it rather soon for friends to play pranks, mama?"

The words seemed to erect a catafalque before their eyes, but, facing the nodding blackness with a calm in which Jack detected the glint of steel, Valerie answered: "I am not aware that they have been playing pranks."

For all the way to the theater Imogen again a.s.sumed the mask, talking exclusively to Mary. She talked of these friends of her mother's, of Sir Basil, Mr. and Mrs. Pakenham, what she had heard of them; holding up, as if for poor, frightened Mary's delectation, an impartial gaily sketched little portrait of their oddities. It was as if she felt it her duty to atone to Mary by her lightness and gaiety for the gloom that had overspread the lunch; as if she wished to a.s.sure Mary that she wouldn't allow her to suffer for other people's ill-temper,--Mrs. Upton had certainly been very silent for the rest of that uncomfortable meal,--as if it were for Mary's sake that she were a.s.suming the mask, behind which, as Jack must know, she was in torture.

"I'm glad you're to see them, Mary darling; they will amuse you. From your standpoint of reality, the standpoint of Puritan civilization--the deepest civilization the world has yet produced; the civilization that judges by the soul--you will be able to judge and place them as few of our people are, as yet, developed enough to do. They are of that funny English type, Mary, the leisured; their business in life that of pleasure seeking; their social service consisting in benevolent domination over the servile cla.s.ses beneath them. Oh, they have their political business, too; we mustn't be unfair; though that consists, in the main, for people of their type, in maintaining their own place as donors and in keeping other people in the place of recipients. In their own eyes, I'm quite sure, they are useful, as upholding the structure of English civilization. You'll find them absolutely simple, absolutely self-a.s.sured, absolutely indifferent, quite charming,--there's no reason why they shouldn't be; but their good manners are for themselves, not for you,--one must never forget that with the English. Do study them, Mary. We need to keep the fact of them clearly before us, for what they represent is a menace to us and to what we mean.

I sometimes think that the future of the world depends upon which ideal is to win, ours or the English. We must arm ourselves with complete comprehension. Already they have infected the cruder types among us."

These were all sentiments that in the past, Mary felt sure, Jack must have acquiesced in and approved of, and yet she felt surer that Imogen's manner of enunciating them was making Jack very angry. She herself did not find them as inspiring as she might have expected, and looking very much frightened and flurried she murmured that as she was to go back to Boston next day she would not have much opportunity for all this observation.

"Besides--I don't believe that I'm so--so wise--so civilized, you know, as to be able to see it all."

"Oh, Imogen will tell you what to see!" said Jack.

"It's very kind of her, I'm sure," poor Mary faltered. She could have burst into tears. These two!--these beloved two!

Meanwhile, at a little later hour, Valerie and Mrs. Wake made their way to the theater, there to meet the group of friends from whom they had parted in England six months before.

The Pakenhams, full of question and comment, were intelligently ama.s.sing well-a.s.sorted impressions of the country that was new to them. Sir Basil, though cheerfully pleased with all to which his attention was drawn, showed no particular interest in his surroundings. His concentration was entirely for his regained friend.

After her welcoming radiance of the day before, Valerie looked pale and weary, and when, with solicitude, he asked her whether she were not tired, she confessed to having slept badly.

"She's changed, you know," Sir Basil said to Mrs. Pakenham, when they were settled in their seats, and Valerie, beside him, was engaged in pointing out people to Tom Pakenham. "It's been frightfully hard on her, all this, I'm sure."

"She's as charming as ever," said Mrs. Pakenham.

"Oh, well, that could never change. But what a shame that she should have had, all along, such a lot to go through." Sir Basil, as a matter of course, had the deepest antipathy for the late Mr. Upton.

The tableaux struck at once the note of success. Saved by Jack's skill from any hint of waxwork or pantomime, their subtle color and tranquil light made each picture a vision of past time, an evocation of h.e.l.lenic beauty and dignity.

Ca.s.sandra in her car--her face (oh, artful Jack!) turned away,--awful before the door of Agamemnon; Iphigenia, sleeping, on her way to the sacrifice; Helen, before her husband and Hecuba; Alcestis, returning from the grave, and Deianira with the robe. The old world of beauty and sorrow, austere and lovely in its doom, pa.s.sed before modern eyes against its background of sky, grove, and palace steps.

"And now," said Valerie, when the lights sprang out for the interval, "now for your introduction to Imogen. They have made her the climax, you see."

"He did, you mean. The young man."

"Yes, Jack arranged it all."

"He's the one you wrote of, of course, who admires her so tremendously."

"He is the one."