"Creatures of the senses!" Jack repeated in a helpless gasp; such words, in their austere vocabulary, were hardly credible. "Do you know what you are saying, you arrogant, you heartless girl?"

Her face seemed to flash at him like lightning from a black cloud, and with the lightning a reality that had lacked before to leap to her voice:

"Ah! At last--at last you are saying what you have felt for a long time!

At last I know what you think of me! So be it! I don't retract one jot or t.i.ttle of what I say. Mama is a perfectly moral woman, if you actually imagine some base imputation; but she lives for the pleasant, the pretty, the easy. She doesn't love this man's soul--nor care if he has one.

Her love for him is a parody of the love that my father taught me to understand and to hold sacred. She loves his love for her; his 'delightful'

appearance. She loves his place and name and all the power and leisure of the life he can give her. She loves the world--in him; and in that I mean and repeat that she is a creature of the senses. And if, for this, you think me arrogant and heartless, you do not trouble in one whit my vision of myself, but you do, forever, mar my vision of you."

They stood face to face in the soft sweet air under an arch of wistaria; it seemed a place to plight a troth, not to break one; but Jack knew that, if he would, he could not have kept the truth from her. It held him, looked from him; he was, at last, inevitably, to speak it.

"Imogen," he said, "I don't want to talk to you about your mother; I don't want to defend her to you; I'm past that. I'll say nothing of your summing up of her character,--it's grotesque, it's piteous, such a.s.surance! But I do tell you straight what I've come to feel of you--that you are a cold-blooded, self-righteous, self-centered girl. And I'll say more: I think that your bringing-up, the artificiality, the complacent theory of it, is your best excuse; and I think that you'll never find any one so generous and so understanding of you as your mother. If this mars me in your eyes, I can't help it."

For a moment, in her deep anger,--horror running through it, too, as though the very bottom had dropped out of things and she saw emptiness beneath her,--she thought that she would tell him to leave her there, forever. But Imogen's intelligence was at times a fairly efficacious subst.i.tute for deeper promptings; and humiliation, instead of enwrapping her mind in a flare of pa.s.sionate vanity, seemed, when such intellectual apprehension accompanied it, to clarify, to steady her thoughts. She saw, now, in the sudden uncanny illumination, that in all her vehemence of this afternoon there had been something fict.i.tious. The sorrow, the resentment on her father's account, she had, indeed, long felt; too long to feel keenly.

Her disapproval of the second marriage was already tinctured by a certain satisfaction; it would free her of a thorn in the flesh, for such her mother's presence in her life had become, and it would justify forever her sense of superiority. It was all the clearest cause for indignation that her mother had given her, and, seeing it as such, she had longed to make Jack share her secure reprobation; but she hadn't, really, been able to feel it as she saw it. It solved too many problems and salved too many hurts. So now, standing there under the arch of wistaria, she saw through herself; saw, at the very basis of her impulse, the dislocation that had made its demonstration dramatic and unconvincing. Dreadful as the humiliation was, her lips growing parched, her throat hot and dry with it, her intelligence saw its cause too clearly for her to resent it as she would have resented one less justified. There was, perhaps, something to be said for Jack, disastrously wrong though he was; and, with all her essential Tightness, there was, perhaps, something to be said against her.

She could not break, without further reflection, the threads that still held them together.

So, at the moment of their deepest hostility, Jack was to have his sweetest impression of her. She didn't order him away in tragic tones, as he almost expected; she didn't overwhelm him with an icy torrent of reproach and argument. Instead, as she stood there against her halo of black, the long regard of her white face fixed on him, her eyes suddenly filled with tears.

She didn't acquiesce for a moment, or, for a moment, imply him anything but miserably, pitiably wrong; but in a voice from which every trace of anger had faded she said: "Oh Jack, how you hurt me!"

The shock of his surprise was so great that his cheeks flamed as though she had struck him. Answering tears sprang to his eyes. He stammered, could not speak at first, then got out: "Forgive me. I'd no business to say it. It's lovely of you, Imogen, not just to send me off."

She felt her triumph, her half-triumph, at once. "Why, Jack, if you think it, why should I forgive you for saying what, to you, seems the truth? You have forgotten me, Jack, almost altogether; but don't forget that truth is the thing that I care most for. If you must think these things of me--and not only of me, of a dearer self, for I understand all that you meant--I must accept the sorrow and pain of it. When we care for people we must accept suffering because of them. Perhaps, in time, you may come to see differently."

He knew, though she made him feel so abashed, that he could take back none of the "things" he thought; but as she had smiled faintly at him he answered with a wavering smile, putting out his hand to hers and holding it while he said: "Shall we agree, then, to say nothing more about it! To be as good friends--as the truth will let us?"

He had never hurt her as at that moment of gentleness, compunction, and inflexibility, and thought, for a moment, was obscured by a rush of bitter pain that could almost have cast her upon his breast, weeping and suppliant for all that his words shut the door on--perhaps forever.

But such impulses were swiftly mastered in poor Imogen. Gravely pressing his hand, she accepted the cutting compact, and, over her breathless sense of loss, held firm to the spiritual advantage of magnanimity and courage.

He judged himself, not her, in letting her go, if he was really letting her go; and she must see him wander away into the darkness, alone, leaving her alone. It was tragic; it was nearly unendurable; but this was one of life's hard lessons; her father had so often told her that they must be unflinchingly faced, unflinchingly conquered. So she triumphed over the weak crying out of human need.

They walked on slowly again, both feeling a little "done." Neither spoke until, at the entrance of the park, and just before leaving its poetry for the screaming prose of the great city, Imogen said: "One thing I want to tell you, Jack, and that is that you may trust mama to me. Whatever I may think of this happiness that she is reaching out for, I shall not make it difficult or painful for her to take it. My pain shall cast no shadow on her gladness."

Jack's face still showed its flush and his voice had all the steadiness of his own interpretation, the steadiness of his refusal to accept hers, as he answered, "Thanks, Imogen; that's very right of you."

XVII

Imogen and Sir Basil were walking down a woodland path under the sky of American summer, a vast, high, cloudless dome of blue. Trees, tall and delicate, in early June foliage, grew closely on the hillside; the gra.s.s of the open glades was thick with wild Solomon's-seal, and fragile cl.u.s.ters of wild columbine grew in the niches and crannies of the rocks, their pale-red chalices filled with fantastically fretted gold.

Imogen, dressed in thin black lawn, fine plaitings of white at throat and wrists, her golden head uncovered, walked a little before Sir Basil with her long, light, deliberate step. She had an errand in the village two miles away, and her mother had suggested that Sir Basil should go with her and have some first impressions of rural New England. He had only arrived the night before. Miss Boc.o.c.k and the Pottses were expected this afternoon, and Mrs. Wake had been for a fortnight established in her tiny cottage on the opposite hillside.

"Tell me about your village here," Sir Basil had said, and Imogen, with punctual courtesy and kindness, the carrying out of her promise to Jack, had rejoined: "It would be rather uneventful annals that I should have to tell you. The people are palely prosperous. They lead monotonous lives.

They look forward for variety and interest, I think, to the summer, when all of us are here. One does all one can, then, to make some color for them. I have organized a kindergarten for the tiny children, and a girls'

club for debates and reading; it will help to an awakening I believe. I'm going to the club this afternoon. I'm very grateful to my girls for helping me as they do to be of use to them. It's quite wonderful what they have done already. Our village life is in no sense like yours in England, you know; these people are all very proud and independent. It's as a friend, not as a Lady Bountiful, that I go among them."

"I see," said Sir Basil, with interest, "that's awfully nice all round.

I wish we could get rid of a lot of stupid ways of thought at home. I'll see something of these friends of yours at the house, then. I'm immensely interested in all these differences, you know."

"You won't see them at the house. Our relation is friendly, not social.

That is a froth that doesn't count."

"Oh! and they don't mind that--not having the social relation, I mean--if they are friends?"

"Why should they? I am not hurt because they do not ask me to their picnics and parties, nor are they because I don't ask them to my dinners and teas.

We both understand that all that is a matter of manner and accident; that in essentials we are equal."

"I see; but," Sir Basil still queried, "you wouldn't care about their parties, I suppose, and don't you think they might like your dinners? At least that's the way it would work out, I'm afraid, at home."

"Ah, it doesn't here. They are too civilized for that. Neither of us would feel fitted to the superficial aspects of the others' lives."

"We have that sort of thing in England, too, you know; only perhaps we look at it more from the other side, and recognize difference rather than sameness."

"Very much more, I think," said Imogen with a slight smile. "I should think that there was very little resemblance. Your social structure is a wholesome, natural growth, embodying ideals that, in the main, are unconscious. We started from that and have been building ever since toward conscious ideals."

"Well,"--Sir Basil pa.s.sed over this simile, a little perplexed,--"it's very wonderful that they shouldn't feel--inferior, you know, in our ugly sense of the word, if they only get one side of friendship and not the other. Now that's how we manage in England, you see; but then I'm afraid it doesn't work out as you say it does here; I'm afraid they do feel inferior, after a fashion."

"Only the truly inferior could feel inferiority, since they get the real side of friendship," said Imogen, with gentle authority. "And I can't think that, in our sense of the word, the real side is given with you. There is conscious condescension, conscious adaptation to a standard supposed lower."

"I see; I see"; Sir Basil murmured, looking, while still perplexed, rather conscience-stricken; "yes, I suppose you're right."

Imogen looked as though she more than supposed it, and, feeling himself quite worsted, Sir Basil went on to ask her further questions about the club and kindergarten.

"What a lot of work it must all mean for you," he said.

"That, I think, is one's only right to the advantages one has--education, taste, inherited traditions," said Imogen, willing to enlighten this charmingly civilized, yet spiritually barbarous, interlocutor who followed her, tall, in his delightfully outdoor-looking garments, his tie and the tilt of his Panama hat answering her nicest sense of fitness, and his handsome brown face, quizzical, yet very attentive, meeting her eyes on its leafy background whenever she turned her head. "If they are not made instruments to use for others they rust in our hands and poison us," she said. "That's the only real significance of an aristocracy, a cla.s.s fitted to serve, with the highest service, the needs of all. Of course, much of our best and deepest thought about these things is English; don't imagine me ungrateful to the n.o.ble thinkers of your--of my--race,--they have moulded and inspired us; but, there is the strange paradox of your civilization, your thought reacts so little on your life. Your idealists and seers count only for your culture, and even in your culture affect so little the automatic existence of your people. They form a little isolated cla.s.s, a leaven that lies outside the lump. Now, with us, thought rises, works, ferments through every section of our common life."

Quite without fire, almost indolently, she spoke; very simply, too, glancing round at him, as though she could not expect much understanding from such an alien listener.

"I'm awfully glad, you know, to get you to talk to me like this," said Sir Basil, after a meditative pause; "I saw a good bit of you in New York, but you never talked much with me."

"You had mama to talk to."

"But I want to talk to you, too. You do a lot of thinking, I can see that."

"I try to"; she smiled a little at his _navete_.

"Your mother told me so much about you that I'm tremendously eager to know you for myself."

"Well, I hope that you may come to, for mama's pictures of me are not likely to be accurate," said Imogen mildly. "We don't think in the same way or see things in the same way and, though we are so fond of each other, we are not interested in the same things. Perhaps that is why I don't interest her particular friends. They would not find much in common between mama and me"; but her smile was now a little humorous and she was quite prepared for his "Oh, but, I a.s.sure you, I am interested in you."

Already, with her unerring instinct for power, Imogen knew that Sir Basil was interested in her. There was only, to be sure, a languid pleasure in the sense of power over a person already, as it were, so bespoken, so in bondage to other altars; but, though without a trace of coquetry, the smile quietly claimed him as a partial, a damaged convert. Imogen always knew when people were capable of being, as she expressed it to herself, "Hers."

She made small effort for those who were without the capacity. She never misdirected such smiles upon Rose, or Miss Boc.o.c.k, or Mrs. Wake. And now, as Sir Basil went on to a.s.severate, just behind her shoulder, his pleasant tones quite touched with eagerness, that the more he saw of her the more interested he became, she allowed him to draw her into a playful argument on the subject.

"Yes, I quite believe that you would like me--if you came to know me"--she was willing to concede at last; "but, no, indeed no, I don't think that you would ever feel much interest in me."