She was soft and fragile and weary, leaning there in her transparent black, her cheek in her hand, her elbow, in, its loose sleeve, resting on the table; but she made him think of a reed: that the tempest could not break.

Her face was pale, he had never seen it so drained of its dusky rose. There was something inexpressibly touching in the flicker of her smile on the white, white cheek, in the innocent gaiety of the dimple placed high and recalling j.a.panese suggestions, vague as the scent of sandal-wood. She, too, had wept, as he well knew; and his heart ached, dully, as he thought of that bitter weeping, those tears, of humility and pain. Her eyelids, strangely discolored, were like the petals of a melancholy flower, and her eyes were heavy and gentle.

A vague, absurdly alarming sense of presage grew upon him as his eyes went from this face to Imogen's--so still, so cold, so unanswering, lightened, as if from a vail of heavy cloud, by that stealthy, baleful, illuminating glance. In Imogen's whole bearing he read renouncement, but renouncement, in her hand, would a.s.suredly prove a scourge for her mother's shoulders.

For the time that they must be together, she and her mother, her sense of her own proved rightness would be relentless, as inflexible as and as relentless as her sense of bitter wrong.

Valerie's shoulders were bared and bowed. She was ready to take it all. But it was here, for Jack, that the deep instinct of protection centered at last in a clear decision; it was here that he felt himself rush in with the only solution, the only salvation. At the thought of it, that one solution, his heart ached more sharply, but it ached for himself alone. For she must go away; yes, that was the only escape; she must go away at once, with Sir Basil. She had failed. She had said it to him that morning in a few broken sentences before relinquishing the hand she grasped.

"I've done more than fail. I've wrecked things"; and she had smiled piteously upon him and left him.

He knew of what she spoke, of the disaster that, as she had seen, finally and irrevocably had overtaken his love for her child.

And it was true, of course. She had failed. She had wrecked things; but in his eyes, the failure she bore, the destruction she brought, made others dark, not her. She must accept the irony of things,--it was not on her that its shadow rested, and she must go, back to her own place, back to her own serene, if saddened, sunlight, where she could breathe again and be safe from scourgings. Thank heaven for Sir Basil, was Jack's thought, over that sharpened ache. And it was with this thought that, for Jack, came the first sinister whisper, the whisper that, as suddenly as the hiss of a viper trodden upon in the gra.s.s, warned him of the fulfilment, clear, startling, unimaginable, of all dim presages.

He always remembered, ludicrously, that they had reached the sweet when the whisper came, and with his recollection of its import there mingled for him always the incongruous a.s.sociation of sliced peaches and iced cream. He had just helped himself to this dish when, raising his eyes, he saw Sir Basil looking at Imogen.

It was, apparently, a calm, a thoughtful look, and as Imogen's eyes were downcast to her fruit and cream, which she was eating with much appet.i.te, she did not then meet it. But it was a look a little off guard;--his perception of that was the first low sibilant that reached him;--it was a look full of gentle solicitude, full of brooding, absorbed intentness; and presently, when Imogen, as if aware of it, glanced up and met it, Sir Basil deeply flushed and turned his eyes away.

This pa.s.sage was a small enough cause to make one suddenly grow very chilly; Jack tried to tell himself that, as he mechanically went on eating.

Perhaps Imogen had confided in Sir Basil; perhaps he agreed with her, was sorry, sympathetic, and embarra.s.sed by a sympathy that set him against the woman he loved; perhaps he already felt a protecting, paternal affection for Imogen, just as he himself, in the absurd inversions of their situation, felt a protecting filial affection for Valerie. But at that thought--as if the weak links of his chain of possibilities had snapped and left him at the verge of a chasm, a sudden echo in himself revealed depths of disastrous a.n.a.logy. It was revelation that came to Jack, rather than self-revelation; the instinct that flamed up in him at this moment was like a torch in a twilit cavern. He might have seen the looming shapes fairly well without it, but, by its illumination, every uncertainty started out into vivid light and dark. The fact that his own feeling was so far other than filial did not detain him. His light was not turned upon himself; of himself he only knew, in that dazzling moment, that he was armed as her knight, armed for her battle as a son could not have been; it was upon Sir Basil, upon Imogen, that the torch-light rested.

He looked presently from them to Valerie. Did she know at all what was her peril? Had she seen at all what threatened her? Her face told him nothing.

She was talking to Miss Boc.o.c.k, and her serenity, as of mellow moonlight, cooled and calmed him a little so that he could wonder whether the peril was very imminent. Even if the unbelievable had happened;--even if Imogen had ensnared Sir Basil--Jack's thoughts, in dealing with poor Imogen, pa.s.sed in their ruthlessness beyond the facts--even if she had ensnared him, surely, surely, she could not keep him. The glamour would pa.s.s from him. He would be the first to fight clear of it were he fully aware of what it signified. For Imogen knew,--the torch-light had revealed that to Jack,--Imogen knew, he and Imogen, alone, knew. Sir Basil didn't and Valerie didn't. Single-handed he might save them both. Save them both from Imogen.

To this strange landing-place had his long voyage, away from old ports, old landmarks, brought him; and on its rocks he stepped to-night, bound on a perilous quest in an unknown country. It seemed almost like the coast of another planet, so desolate, so lonely. But beyond the frowning headlines he imagined that he would find, far inland, quiet green stretches where he would rest, and think of her. The landing was bathed in a light sadder, but sweeter far than the sunlight of other countries. Here he was to fight, not for himself, but for her.

The first move of strategy was made directly after dinner. He asked Imogen to come out and see the moonlight with him.

A word to the wise was a word to Mrs. Wake, who safely cornered Miss Boc.o.c.k and the Pottses over a game of cards. Jack saw Valerie and Sir Basil established on the veranda, and then led Imogen away, drew her from her quarry, along the winding path in the woods.

XXII

Valerie, on sinking into the low wicker chair, and drawing her chuddah about her shoulders, drawing it closely, although the evening was not cool had expected to find Jack, or Mrs. Wake, or Miss Boc.o.c.k presently beside her.

She had watched, as they wandered, all of them, into the drawing-room, the hovering, long since familiar to her, of Sir Basil. She had seen that his eye was as much on Imogen as on herself. She had seen Imogen's eye meet his with a deep insistence. What it commanded, this eye, Valerie did not know, but she had grown accustomed to seeing such glances obeyed and she expected to watch, presently, Imogen's and Sir Basil's departure into the moonlit woods.

It was, therefore, with surprise that she looked up to see Sir Basil's form darken against the sky. He asked if he might smoke his cigar beside her, and the intelligent smile he knew so well rested upon him as he took the chair next hers.

In the slight pause that followed, both were thinking that, since their parting in England they had really been very seldom alone together, and in Sir Basil's mind was a wonder, very disquieting, as to what, really, had been the understanding under the parting.

He was well aware that any vagueness as to understanding had been owing entirely to Valerie, well aware that had she not always kept about them the atmosphere of sunny frankness and gay friendship, he would without doubt have entangled himself and her in the complications of an avowed devotion, and that long before her husband's death. For how she had charmed him, this gay, this deep-hearted friend, descending suddenly on his monotonous life with a flutter of wings, a flash of color, a liquid pulse of song, like some strange, bright bird. Charm had grown to affection and to trustful need, and then to the restlessness and pain and sadness of his hidden pa.s.sion. He would have spoken, he knew it very well, were it not that she had never given him the faintest chance to speak, the faintest excuse for speaking. She had kept him from any avowal so completely that he might well, now, wonder if his self-control had not been owing far more to the intuition of hopelessness than to mere submission. Could she have kept him so silent, had she been the least little bit in love with him? He had, of course, been tremendously in love with her--it was bewildering to use the past tense, indeed--and she, of course, clever creature that she was, must have known it; but hadn't he been very fatuous in imagining that beneath her fond, playful friendship lay the possibility of a deeper response?

Since seeing her again, in her effaced, maternal role, he had realized that she was more middle-aged than he had ever thought her, and since coming to Vermont there had been a new emphasis in this cool, gray quality that removed her the more from a.s.sociations with youth and pa.s.sion. So was he brought, by the dizzy turn of events, to hoping that loyalty to his own past love was, for him, the only question, since loyalty to her, in that respect, had never been expected of him.

Yet, as he took his place beside her and looked at her sitting there in the golden light, wrapped round in white, very wan and pale, despite her smile, he felt the strangest, twisted pang of divided desire.

She was wan and she was pale, but she was not cool, she was not gray; he felt in her, as strongly as in far-off days, the warmth and fragrance, and knew that it was Imogen who had so cast her into a shadow. Her image had grown dim on that very first time of seeing Imogen standing as Antigone in the rapt, hushed theater. That dawn had culminated to-day in the over-mastering, all-revealing burst of noon, and from its radiance the past had been hardly visible except as shadow. But now he sat in the moonlight, the past personified in the quiet presence beside him, and the memory of noonday itself became mirage-like and uncertain. He almost felt as if he had been having a wild dream, and that Valerie's glance was the awakening from it.

To think of Imogen's filial grief and of his promise to her,--a promise deeply recalled to him by the message of her tear-worn eyes,--to steady his mind to the task of friendly helpfulness, was to put aside the accompanying memory of eyes, lips, gold hair on a background of flowering laurel, was to re-enter, through sane, kind altruism, his old, normal state of consciousness, and to shut the door on something very sweet and wonderful, to shut the door--in Imogen's phraseology--on his soul, but, in doing that, to be loyal to the older hope.

Perhaps, he reflected, looking at Valerie through the silvery circles of smoke, it depended on her as to whether the door should remain shut on all the high visions of the last weeks. After all, it had always depended on her, tremendously, as to where he should find himself. Certainly he couldn't regard her as the ant.i.thesis of soul, though he didn't a.s.sociate her with its radiant demonstration, yet he felt that, if she so willed it, she could lock the door on visions and keep him sanely, safely, sweetly beside her for the future. If she really did care. Poor Sir Basil, sitting there in his faint cloud of smoke, while clouds of doubt and perplexity--as impalpable drifted through his mind, really couldn't for the life of him have told which solution he most hoped for.

He plunged from the rather humiliating pause of self-contemplation into the more congenial field of action, with a last swift thought--most illuminating of all--as he plunged--that in the results of action he would find his test. If she cared for him--really cared--she would grant his request; and if she cared, why then, not only reawakened loyalty, but some very deep acquiescence in his own nature, would keep him beside her, and to-night would see them as affianced lovers. It would be a pity to have let one's new-found soul go; but, after all, it was so very new that the pang of parting would soon be over; that was a good point about middle-age, one soon got over pangs, soon forgot visions.

"I want to talk to you about something. I'm going to ask you to be kinder to me, even, than you've ever been,"--so he approached the subject, while the mingled peace and bitterness of the last thoughts lingered with him.

"I'm going to ask you to let me be very indiscreet, very intimate. It's about something very personal."

Valerie no longer smiled, but she looked even more gentle and even more intelligent. "I will be as kind as you can possibly want me to be," she answered.

"It's about--about Miss Upton."

"About Imogen? Don't you call her Imogen yet? You must."

"I will. I've just begun"; and with this avowal Sir Basil turned away his eyes for a moment, and even in the moonlight showed his flush. "I had a long talk with her this afternoon."

"Yes. I supposed that you had. You may be perfectly frank with me," said Valerie, her eyes on his averted face.

"She was most dreadfully cut up, you know. She came rushing up to the pine woods--I was smoking there--rushing up as if she were running for her life--crying,--exhausted,--in a dreadful state."

"Yes. I know."

"Yes, of course you do. What don't you know and what don't you understand,"

said Sir Basil gratefully, his eyes coming back to hers. "So I needn't go over it all--what she feels about it. I realize very well that you feel for her as much as I do."

"Oh, yes, you must realize that," said Valerie, a little faintly.

"She was in such a state that one simply had to try to comfort her,--if one could,--and we have come to be such friends;--so she told me everything."

"Yes. Of course."

"Well that's just it. What I want to ask you is--can't you, for her sake, quite apart from your own feelings--give in about it?" So spoke Sir Basil, sitting in the moonlight, the spark of his cigar waning as, in the long pause that followed, he held it, forgotten, in an expectant, arrested hand. Her voice had helped and followed him with such gentleness, such understanding that, though the pause grew, he hardly thought that it needed the added, "I do beg it of you," that he brought out presently to make her acquiescence more sure; and his shock of disappointment was sharpened by surprise to a quick displeasure when, her eyes pa.s.sing from his face and resting for long on the shadowy woods, she said in a deadened voice, a voice strangely lacking in feeling:--"I can't."

He couldn't conceal the disappointment nor, quite, the displeasure. "You can't? Really you can't?--Forgive me, but don't you think she's a right to have it written, her father's life, you know, if she feels so deeply about it?"

"I can't. I will never give my consent," Valerie repeated.

"But, she's breaking her heart over it," Sir Basil deeply protested; and before the quality of the protestation she paused again, as though to give herself time to hide something.

"I know that it is hard for her," was all she said at last.

Protestation gave way to wonder, deep and sad. "And for her sake--for _my_ sake, let me put it--you can't let bygones be bygones?--You can't give her her heart's desire?--My dear friend, it's such a little thing."

"I know that. But it's for his sake that I can't," said Valerie.

Sir Basil, at this, was silent, for a long time. Perplexity mingled with his displeasure, and the pain of failure, the strangely complex pain.