"Oh, it's not that she doesn't care--"

"What is it, then, you carping, skeptical creature? It's all perfect. An uncongenial, tiresome husband--and she need have no self-reproach about him, either--finally out of the way; a reverential adorer at hand; youth still theirs; money; a delightful place--what more could one ask?"

"Ah," Mrs. Wake sighed a little, "I don't know. It's not, perhaps, that one would ask more, but less. It's too pretty, too easy, too _a propos_; so much so that it frightens me a little. Valerie has, you see, made a mess of it. She has, you see, spoiled her life, in that aspect of it. To mend it now, so completely, to start fresh at--how old is she?--at forty-six, it's just a little glib. Somehow one doesn't get off so easily as that. One can't start so happily at forty-six. Perhaps one is wiser not to try."

"Oh, nonsense, my dear! It's very American, that, you know, that picking of holes in excellent material, furbishing up your consciences, running after your motives as if you were ferrets in a rat-hole. If all you have to say against it is that it's too perfect, too happy,--why, then I keep to my own conviction. She'll be peacefully married and back among us in a year."

Mrs. Wake seemed to acquiesce, yet still to have her reserves. "There's Imogen, you know. Imogen has to be counted with."

"Counted with! Valerie, I hope, is clever enough to manage that young person. It would be a little too much if the daughter spoiled the end of her life as the husband spoiled the beginning."

"You are a bit hard on Everard, you know, from mere partizanship. Valerie was by no means a misused wife and his friends may well have thought him a misused husband; Imogen does, I'm sure. She has, perhaps, a right to feel that, as her father's representative, her mother owes her something in the way of atonement."

"It does vex me, my dear, to have you argue like that against your own convictions. It was all his fault,--one only has to know her to be sure of it. He made things unbearable for her."

"It was hardly his fault. He couldn't help being unbearable."

"Well--certainly _she_ couldn't help it!" cried Mrs. Pakenham, laughing as if this settled it. She rose, putting her hands on the mantelpiece and warming her foot preparatory to her departure; and, summing up her cheerful convictions, she added: "I'm sorry for the poor man, of course; but, after all, he seems to have done very much what he liked with his life. And I can't help being very glad that he didn't succeed in quite spoiling hers.

Good luck to Sir Basil is what I say."

III

Mrs. Upton was in the drawing-room next morning when Sir Basil Thremdon was announced. She had not seen this old friend and neighbor since the news of her bereavement had reached her, and now, rising to meet him, a consciousness of all that had changed for her, a consciousness, perhaps more keen, of all that had changed for him, showed in a deepening of her color.

Sir Basil was a tall, spare, stalwart man of fifty, the limpid innocence of his blue eyes contrasting with his lean, aquiline countenance. His hair and mustache were bleached by years to a light fawn-color and his skin tanned by a hardy life to a deep russet; and these tints of fawn and russet predominated throughout his garments with a pleasing harmony, so that in his rough tweeds and riding-gaiters he seemed as much a product of the nature outside as any bird or beast. The air of a delightfully civilized rurality was upon him, an air of landowning, law-dispensing, sporting efficiency; and if, in the fitness of his coloring, he made one think of a fox or a pheasant, in character he suggested nothing so much as one of the deep-rooted oaks of his own park. His very simplicity and uncomplexity of consciousness was as fresh, as wholesome, as genially encompa.s.sing, as full summer foliage. One rested in his shade.

He was an inarticulate person and his eyes, now, in their almost seared solicitude, spoke more of sympathy and tenderness than his halting tongue.

He ended by repeating a good many times that he hoped she wasn't too frightfully pulled down. Mrs. Upton said that she was really feeling very well, though conscious that her sincerity might somewhat bewilder her friend in his conceptions of fitness, and they sat down side by side on a small sofa near the window.

We have said that for the first years of her freedom Mrs. Upton had been very gay. Of late years the claims on her resources from the family across the Atlantic had a good deal clipped her wings, and, though she made a round of spring and of autumn visits, she spent her time for the most part in her little Surrey house, engaged desultorily in gardening, study, and the entertainment of the friend or two always with her. She had not found it difficult to fold her wings and find contentment in the more nest-like environment. She had never been a woman to seek, accepting only, happily, whatever gifts life brought her; and it seemed as natural to her that things should be taken as that things should be given. But with the renouncement of more various outlooks this autumnal quietness, too, had brought its gift, discreet, delicate, a whispered sentence, as it were, that one could only listen to blindfolded, but that, once heard, gave one the knowledge of a hidden treasure. Sir Basil had been one of the reasons, the greatest reason, for her happiness in the Surrey nest. It was since coming there to live that she had grown to know him so well, with the slow-developing, deep-rooted intimacy of country life. The meadows and parks of Thremdon Hall encompa.s.sed all about the heath where Valerie Upton's cottage stood among its trees. They were Sir Basil's woods that ran down to her garden walls and Sir Basil's lanes that, at the back of the cottage, led up, through the heather, to the little village, a mile or so away. She had met Sir Basil before coming to live there, once or twice in London, and once or twice for week-ends at country-houses; but he was not a person whom one came really to know in drawing-room conditions; indeed, at the country-houses one hardly saw him except at breakfast and dinner; he was always hunting, golfing, or playing billiards, and in the interludes to these occupations one found him a trifle somnolent. It was after settling quite under his wing--and that she was under it she had discovered only after falling in love with the little white cottage and rushing eagerly into tenancy--that she had found out what a perfect neighbor he was; then come to feel him as a near friend; then, as those other friends had termed it, to care for him.

Valerie Upton, herself, had never called it by any other name, this feeling about Sir Basil; though it was inevitable, in a woman of her clearness of vision, that she should very soon recognize a more definite quality in Sir Basil's feeling about her. That she had always kept him from naming it more definitely was a feat for which, she well knew it, she could allow herself some credit. Not only had it needed, at some moments, dexterity; it had needed, at others, self-control. Self-control, however, was habitual to her. She had long since schooled herself into the acceptance of her stupidly maimed life, seeing herself in no pathetic similes at all, but, rather, as a foolish, unformed creature who, partly through blindness, partly through recklessness, had managed badly to cripple herself at the outset of life's walk, and who must make the best of a hop-skip-and-jump gait for the rest of it. She had felt, when she decided that she had a right to live away from Everard, that she had no right to ask more of fortune than that escape, that freedom. One paid for such freedom by limiting one's possibilities, and she had never hesitated to pay. Never to indulge herself in sentimental repinings or in sentimental musings, never to indulge others in sentimental relationships, had been the most obvious sort of payment; and if, in regard to Sir Basil, the payment had sometimes been difficult, the reward had been that sense of unblemished peace, that sense of composure and gaiety. It was enough to know, as a justification of her success, that she made him happy, not unhappy. It was enough to know that she could own freely to herself how much she cared for him, so much that, finding him funny, dear, and dull, she was far fonder of his funniness, of his dullness, than of other people's cleverness. He made her feel as if, on that maimed, that rather hot and jaded walk, she had come upon the great oak-tree and sat down to rest in its peaceful shadow, hearing it rustle happily over her and knowing that it was secure strength she leaned against, knowing that the happy rustle was for her, because she was there, peaceful and confident. So it had all been like a gift, a sad, sweet secret that one must not listen to except with blindfolded eyes. She had never allowed the gift to become a burden or a peril. And now, to-day, for the first time, it was as though she could raise the bandage and look at him.

She sat beside him in her widow's enfranchising blackness and she couldn't but seer at last, how deep was that upwelling, inevitable fondness. So deep that, gazing, as if with new and dazzled eyes, she wondered a little giddily over the long self-mastery; so deep that she almost felt it as a strange, unreal tribute to trivial circ.u.mstance that, without delay, she should not lean her head against the dear oak and tell it, at last, that its shelter was all that she asked of life. It was necessary to banish the vision by the firm turning to that other, that dark one, of her dead husband, her grief-stricken child, and, in looking, she knew that while it was so near she could not dwell on the possibilities of freedom. So she talked with her friend, able to smile, able, once or twice, to use toward him her more intimate tone of affectionate playfulness.

"But you are coming back--directly!" Sir Basil exclaimed, when she told him that she expected her boy in a few days and that they would sail for New York together.

Not directly, she answered. Before very long, she hoped. So many things depended on Imogen.

"But she will live with you now, over here."

"I don't think that she will want to leave America," said Valerie. "I don't think, even, that I want her to."

"But this is your home, now," Sir Basil protested, looking about, as though for evidences of the a.s.sertion, at the intimate comforts of the room. "You know that you are more at home here than there."

"Not now. My home, now, is Imogen's."

Sir Basil appeared to reflect, and then to put aside reflection as, after all, inapplicable, as yet, to the situation.

"Well, I must pay America a visit," he said with an unemphatic smile. "I've not been there for twenty years, you know. I'll like seeing it again, and seeing you--in Miss Imogen's home."

Valerie again flushed a little. In some matters Sir Basil was anything but dull, and his throwing, now, of the bridge was most tactfully done. He intended that she should see it solidly spanning the distance between them and only time was needed, she knew, to give him his right of walking over it, and her right--but that was one of the visions she must not look at.

A great many things lay between now and then, confused, anxious, perhaps painful, things. The figure of Imogen so filled the immediate future that the place where Sir Basil should take up his thread was blotted into an almost melancholy haze of distance. But it was good to feel the bridge there, to know him so swift and so sure.

"She is very clever, your girl, isn't she? I've always felt it from what you've told me," he said, defining for himself, as she saw, the future where they were to meet.

"Very, I think."

"Very learned and artistic. I'm afraid she'll find me an awful Philistine.

You must stand up for me with her."

"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 a.s.severating, "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 gra.s.sy 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."