"Don't think of me!" Imogen breathed out on a note of pain. "It's not of myself I'm thinking, not of my humiliation and despair--but of him!--of him!--Is it _right_ that I should submit? _Ought_ a project like ours to be abandoned for such a reason?"

Again Sir Basil was silent for some moments, considering the narrow white hands. "Perhaps she'll come round,--think better of it."

"Ah!--" it was now on a note of deep, of tremulous hope that she breathed it out, looking into his eyes with the profound, searching look so moving to him; "Ah!--it's there, it's there, that you could help me. She would never yield to me. She might to you."

"Oh, I don't think that likely," Sir Basil protested, the flush darkening.

"Yes, yes," said Imogen, leaning toward him above his clasp of her hand.

"Yes, if anything is likely that is so. If hope is anywhere, it's there.

Don't you see, in her eyes I stand for _him_. To yield to me would be like yielding to him, would be his triumph. That's what she can't forgive in me--that I do stand for him, that I live by all that she rejected. She would never yield to me,--but she might yield _for_ you."

"Shall I speak to her about it?" Sir Basil asked abruptly, after another moment in which Imogen's hand grasped his tightly, its soft, warm fingers more potent in appeal than even her eyes had been. And now, again, she leaned toward him, her eyes inundating him with radiant trust and grat.i.tude, her hands drawing his hand to her breast and holding it there, so clasped.

"Will you?--Oh, will you?--dear Sir Basil."

Sir Basil stammered a little. "I'll have a try--It's hard on you, I think.

I don't see why you shouldn't have your heart's desire. It's an awfully queer thing to do,--but, for your sake, I'll have a try--put it to her, you know."

"Ah, I _knew_ that you were big," said Imogen.

He looked at her, his hand between her hands. The flowering laurel was behind her head. The pine-forest murmured about them. The sky was blue above them, and the deep blue of the distance lay at their feet. Suddenly, as they looked into each other's eyes, it dawned in the consciousness of both that something was happening.

It was to Sir Basil that it was happening. Imogen's was but the consciousness of his experience. Such a thing could hardly happen to Imogen. Neither her senses, nor her emotions, nor her imagination played any dominant part in her nature. She was incapable of falling in love in the helpless, headlong, human fashion that the term implies. But though such feeling lacked, the perception of it in others was swift, and while she leaned to Sir Basil in the sunlight, while she clasped his hand to her breast, while their eyes dwelt deeply on each other, she seemed to hear, like a rising chime of wonder and delight, the ringing of herald bells that sang: "Mine--mine--mine--if I choose to take him."

Wonderful indeed it was to feel this influx of certain power. Sunlight, like that about them, seemed to rise, slowly, softly, within her, like the upwelling of a spring of joy.

It was happening, it had happened to him, his eyes told her that; but whether he knew as she did she doubted and, for the beautiful moment, it added a last touch of charm to her exultation to know that, while she was sure, she could leave that light veil of his wonder shimmering between them.

With the vision of the unveiling her mind leaped to the thought of her mother and of Jack, and with that thought came a swift pulse of vengeful gladness. So she would make answer to them both--the scorner--the rejector.

Not for a moment must she listen to the voices of petty doubts and pities.

This love, that lay like a bauble in her mother's hand--an unfit ornament for her years--would shine on her own head like a diadem. Unasked, undreamed of, it had turned to her; it was her highest duty to keep and wear it. It was far, far more than her duty to herself; it was her duty to this man, finished, mature, yet full of unawakened possibility; it was her duty to that large, vague world that his life touched, a world where her young faiths and vigors would bring a light such as her mother's gay little taper could never spread. These thoughts, and others, flashed through Imogen's mind, with the swiftness and exact.i.tude of a drowning vision. Yet, after the long moment of vivid realization, it was at its height that a qualm, a sinking overtook her. The gift had come; of that she was sure. But its triumphant displayal might be delayed--nay, might be jeopardized. Some perverse loyalty in his nature, some terrified decisiveness of action on her mother's part, and the golden reality might even be made to crumble.

For one moment, as the qualm seized her, she saw herself--and the thought was like a flying flame that scorched her lips as it pa.s.sed--she saw herself sweeping aside the veil, sinking upon his breast, with tears that would reveal him to himself and her to him.

But it was impossible for Imogen to yield open-eyed to temptation that could not be sanctified. Her strong sense of personal dignity held her from the impulse, and a quick recognition, too, that it might lower her starry alt.i.tude in his eyes. She must stand still, stand perfectly still, and he would come to her. She could protect him from her mother's clinging--this she recognized as a strange yet an insistent duty--but between him and her there must not be a shadow, an ambiguity.

The radiance of the renunciation, the resolve, was in her face as she gently released his hand, gently rose, standing smiling, with a strange, rapt smile, above him.

Sir Basil rose, too, silent, and looking hard at her. She guessed at the turmoil, the wonder of his honest soul, his fear lest she did guess it, and, with the fear, the irrepressible hope that, in some sense, it was echoed.

"My dear, dear friend," she said, putting her hand on his shoulder, as though with the gesture she dubbed him her knight, "my more than friend--shall it be elder brother?--I believe that you will be able to help me and my father. And if you fail--my grat.i.tude to you will be none the less great. I can't tell you how I trust you, how I care for you."

From his face she looked up at the sky above them; and in the sunlight her innocent, uplifted smile made her like a heavenly child. "Isn't it wonderful?--beautiful?--" she said, almost conquering her inner fear by the seeming what she wished to be. "Look up, Sir Basil!--Doesn't it seem to heal everything,--to glorify everything,--to promise everything?"

He looked up at the sky, still speechless. Her face, her smile--the sky above it--did it not heal, glorify, promise in its innocence? If a great thing claims one suddenly, must not the lesser things inevitably go?--Could one hold them?--Ought one to try to hold them? There was tumult in poor Sir Basil's soul, the tumult of partings and meetings.

But when everything culminated in the longing to seize this heavenly child--this heavenly woman--to seize and kiss her--a st.u.r.dy sense of honesty warned him that not so could he, with honor, go forward. He must see his way more clearly than that. Strange that he had been so blind, till now, of where all ways, since his coming to Vermont, had been leading him.

He could see them now, plainly enough.

Taking Imogen's hand once more, he pressed it, dropped it, looked into her eyes and said, as they turned to the descent: "That was swearing eternal friendship, wasn't it!"

XXI

Violent emotions, in highly civilized surroundings, may wonderfully be effaced by the common effort of those who have learned how to live. Of these there were, perhaps, not many in our little group; but the guidance of such a past mistress of the art as Imogen's mother steered the social craft, on this occasion, past the reefs and breakers into a tolerably smooth sea.

With an ally as facile, despite his personal perturbations, as Sir Basil, a friend like Mrs. Wake at hand--a friend to whom one had never to make explanations, yet who always understood what was wanted of her,--with a presence so propitious as the calm and unconscious Miss Boc.o.c.k, the sickening plunges of explanation and recrimination that accompany unwary seafaring and unskilful seamanship were quite avoided in the time that pa.s.sed between Valerie's appearance at the tea-table--where she dispensed refreshment to Mrs. Wake, Miss Boc.o.c.k, and Jack only--and the meeting of all the ship's crew at dinner.

Valerie, in that ominous interlude, even when Sir Basil appeared on the veranda, alone, but saying that he had been for a walk with Miss Upton, who was tired and had gone to her room to rest, even when she observed that the Pottses had decided upon maintaining a splendid isolation in their own chambers, did not permit the ship to turn for one moment in such a direction. She had tea sent up to Imogen and tea sent up to the Pottses; but no messages of any sort accompanied either perfectly appointed tray, and when the dinner hour arrived she faced the Pottses' speechless dignity and Imogen's _mater dolorosa_ eyelids with perfect composure. She seemed, on meeting the Pottses, neither to ignore nor to recall.

She seemed to understand speechlessness, yet to take it lightly, as if on their account. She talked at them, through them, with them, really, in such a manner that they were drawn helplessly into her shuttle and woven into the gracefully gliding pattern of social convention in spite of themselves.

In fact, she preserved appearances with such success that everyone, to each one's surprise, was able to make an excellent dinner.

After high emotions, as after high seas, the appet.i.te is capricious, shrinking to the shudder of repulsion or rising to whetted keenness.

Valerie had the satisfaction of seeing that her crew, as they a.s.sured themselves--or, rather, as she a.s.sured them--that the waters were silken in their calm, showed the reaction from moral stress in wholesome sensuous gratification. Even Mrs. and Mr. Potts, even Imogen, were hungry.

She herself had still too strongly upon her the qualm of imminent shipwreck to do more than seem to join them; but it was only natural that the captain, who alone was conscious of just how near the reefs were and of just how threatening the horizon loomed, should lack the appet.i.te that his rea.s.suring presence evoked. Jack noticed that she ate nothing, but he alone noticed it.

It was perhaps Jack who noticed most universally at that wonderful little dinner, where the shaded candle-light seemed to isolate them in its soft, diffused circle of radiance and the windows, with their faintly stirring muslin curtains, to open on a warm, mysterious ocean of darkness. The others were too much occupied with their own particular miseries and in their own particular reliefs to notice how the captain fared.

Mrs. Wake must, no doubt, guess that something was up, but she couldn't in the least guess how much. She watched, but her observation, her watchfulness, could be in no sense like his own. Miss Boc.o.c.k, in a low-cut blouse of guipure and pale-blue satin, her favorite red roses pinned on her shoulder, her fringe freshly and crisply curled above her eyegla.s.ses, was the only quite unconscious presence, and so innocent was her unconsciousness that it could not well be observant. Indeed, in one sinking moment, she leaned forward, with unwonted kindliness, to ask the stony Mrs.

Potts if her headache was better, a question received with a sphinx-like bow. Apart, however, from the one or two blunders of unconsciousness, Jack saw that Miss Boc.o.c.k was very useful to Valerie; more useful than himself, on whom, he felt, her eye did not venture to rest for any length of time.

Too tragic a consciousness would rise between them if their glances too deeply intermingled.

Miss Boc.o.c.k's gaze, behind its crystal medium, was a smooth surface from which the light b.a.l.l.s of dialogue rebounded easily. Miss Boc.o.c.k thought that she had never talked so well upon her own topics as on this occasion, and from the intentness of the glances turned upon her she might well have been misled as to her effectiveness. The company seemed to thirst for every detail as to her theory of the rise of the Mycenean civilization. Mrs.

Wake, for all her tact, was too wary, too observant, to fill so perfectly the part of buffer-state as was Miss Boc.o.c.k.

If one wanted pure amus.e.m.e.nt, with but the faintest tincture of pity to color it, the countenances of the Pottses were worth close study. That their silence was not for one moment allowed to become awkward, to themselves, or to others, Jack recognized as one of Valerie's miracles that night, and when he considered that the Pottses might not guess to whom they owed their ease, he could hardly pity them. That their eyes should not meet his, except for a heavy stare or two, was natural. After this meeting in the mirage-like oasis that Valerie made bloom for them all, he knew that for the Pottses he would be relegated to the sightless, soundless Saharas of a burning remembrance. It was but a small part of his attention that was spared to the consciousness that Mr. Potts was very uplifted, that Mrs.

Potts was very tense, and that Mrs. Potts's dress, as if in protest against any form of relaxation and condonation, was very, very high and tight.

Indeed, Mrs. Potts, in her room, before the descent, had said to her husband, in the mutual tones of their great situation, laying aside with resolution the half-high bodice that, till then, had marked her concession to fashionable standards, "Never, never again, in her house. Let her bare her bosom if she will. I shall protest against her by every symbol."

Mr. Potts, with somber justice, as though he exonerated an Agrippina from one of many crimes, had remarked that the bosom, as far as he had observed it, had been slightly veiled; but:--"I understand those tuckers," Mrs.

Potts had replied with a withering smile, presenting her back for her husband to hook, a marital office that usually left Mr. Potts in an exhausted condition.

So Mrs. Potts this evening seemed at once to mourn, to protest and to accuse, covered to her chin with a relentless black.

But, though Jack saw all this, he was not in the humor for more than a superficial sense of amus.e.m.e.nt. With his excited sense of mirth was a deeper sense of disaster, and the poor Pottses were at once too grotesque and too insignificant to satisfy it.

It was upon Imogen and Sir Basil that his eye most frequently turned.

Valerie had put them together, separated from herself by the whole length of the table; Mr. Potts was on Imogen's other hand; Miss Boc.o.c.k sat between Mr. Potts and Valerie, and Jack, Mrs. Wake and Mrs. Potts brought the circle round to Sir Basil, a neat gradation of affinities.

Jack, in a glance, had seen that Imogen had been pa.s.sionately weeping; he could well imagine that grief. But before her pallid face and sunken eyes he knew that his heart was hardened. Never, judged from a dispa.s.sionate standard, had Imogen been so right, and her rightness left him indifferent.

If she had been wrong; if she had been, in some sense guilty, if her consciousness had not been so supremely spotless, he would have been sorrier for her. It was the woman beside him whose motives he could not penetrate, whose action to-day had seemed to him mistaken, it was for her that his heart ached. Imogen he seemed to survey from across a far, wide chasm of alienation.

Sir Basil was evidently as bent on helping her as was her mother. He talked very gaily, tossing back all Valerie's b.a.l.l.s. He rallied Miss Boc.o.c.k on her radical tendencies, and engaged in a humorous dispute with Mrs. Wake in defense of racing. Imogen, when he spoke, turned her eyes on him and listened gravely. When her mother spoke, she looked down at her plate. But once or twice Jack caught her eye, while her mother's attention was engaged elsewhere, resting upon her with a curious, a piercing intentness. Such a cold glitter, as of steel, was in the glance, that, instinctively, his own turned on Valerie, as if he had felt her threatened.

This instinct of protection was oddly on the watch to-night. Under the sense of mirth and disaster a deeper thing throbbed in him, some inarticulate sorrow, greater than the apparent causes warranted, that mourned with and for her. In the illumination of this intuition Valerie, he thought, had never been so lovely as to-night. It seemed to him that her body, with its indolence of aspect, expressed an almost superhuman courage.