"Meet him. Yes. What have you to say to it?"

"But why meet him?--Why now?" The wonder on Valerie's face had broken to almost merriment. "Did he ask you to?--Really, really, he oughtn't to.

Really, my child, I can't have you meeting Sir Basil in the woods at midnight."

"You can't have me meeting him in the woods at midnight?" Imogen repeated, an ominous cadence, holding her head high and taking long breaths. "You say that, dare say it, when you well know that I can meet him nowhere else and in no other way. It was _I_ who asked him to meet me here and it is here, confronted with you, if you so choose; it is here, before you and under G.o.d's stars, that I shall know the truth from him. I am not ashamed; I am proud to say it;--I love him. And though you scheme, and stoop and strive to take him from me--you, with Jack to help you--Jack to lie for you--as he did this morning,--I know, I know in my heart and soul that he loves me, that he is mine."

"Jack!--Jack!" Valerie cried. She caught him back, for he started forward to seize, to gag her daughter; "Jack--remember, remember!--She doesn't understand!"

"Oh, he may strike me if he wills." Imogen had stood quite still, not flinching.

"I don't want to strike you--you--you idiot!"--Jack was gasping. "I want to force you to your knees, before your mother--who loves you--as no one else who knows you will ever love you!" And, helplessly, his old words, so trite, so inadequate, came back to him. "You self-centered, you self-righteous, you cold-hearted girl!"

Valerie still held his arm with both hands, leaning upon him.

"Imogen," she said, speaking quickly, "you needn't meet Sir Basil in this way;--there is nothing to prevent you from seeing him where and when you will. You are right in believing that he loves you. He asked me this morning for your hand. And I gave him my consent."

From a virgin saint Imogen, as if with the wave of a wand, saw herself turned into a rather foolish genie, so transformed and then, ever so swiftly, run into a bottle;--it was surely the graceful seal firmly affixed thereto when she heard these words of conformity to the traditions of dignified betrothal. And for once in her life, so bottled and so sealed, she looked, as if through the magic crystal of her mother's words, absolutely, helplessly foolish. It is difficult for a genie in a bottle to look contrite or stricken with anything deeper than astonishment; nor is it practicable in such a situation to fall upon one's knees,--if a genie were to feel such an impulse of self-abas.e.m.e.nt. It was perhaps a comfort to all concerned, including a new-comer, that Imogen should be reduced to the silence of sheer stupefaction; and as Sir Basil appeared among them it was not at him, after her first wide glance, that she looked, but, still as if through the crystal bottle, at her mother, and the look was, at all events, a confession of utter inadequacy to deal with the situation in which she found herself.

It was Valerie, once more, who steered them all past the giddy whirlpool.

Jack, beside her, his heart and brain turning in dizzy circles, marveled at her steadiness of eye, her clearness of voice. He would have liked to lean against a tree and get his breath; but this delicate creature, rising from her rack, could move forward to her place beside the helm, and smile!

"Sir Basil," she said, and she put out her hand to him so mildly that Sir Basil may well have thought his rather uncomfortable _rendezvous_ redeemed into happiest convention, "here we all are waiting for you, and here we are going to leave you, you and Imogen, to take a walk and to say some of all the things you will have to say to each other. Give me your hand, Imogen.

There, dear friend, I think that it is yours, and I trust her life to you with, my blessing. Now take your walk, I will wait for you, as late as you like, in the drawing-room."

So was the bottled genie released, so did it resume once more the figure of a girl, hardly humbled, yet, it must be granted, deeply confused. In perfect silence Imogen walked away beside her suitor, and it may be said that she never told him of the little episode that had preceded his arrival. Jack and Valerie went slowly on toward the house. Now that she had grasped the helm through the whirlpool he almost expected that she would fall upon the deck. But, silently, she walked beside him, not taking his arm, wrapped closely in her shawl, and, once more inside the dark drawing-room, she proceeded to light the candles on the mantel-piece, saying that she would wait there until the others came in, smiling very faintly as she added:--"That everything may be done properly and in order."

Jack walked up and down the room, his hands deeply thrust into the pockets of his dining-jacket.

"As for you, you had better go to bed," Valerie went on after a moment. She had placed the candles on a table, taken a chair near them and chosen a review. She turned the pages while she spoke.

At this, he, too, being disposed of, he stopped before her. "And you wanted me to be glad!"

Her eyes on the unseen print, she turned her pages, and now that they were out of the woods and surrounded by walls and furniture and everyday symbols, he saw that the pressure of his presence was heavier, and that she blushed a deep, weary blush. But she was able and willing quite to dispose of him. "I want you to be glad," she answered.

"For her!"--For that creature!--his words implied.

"It was natural, what she thought," said Valerie after a moment, though not looking up.

"Natural!--To suspect you!"--

"Of what you wanted me to do?" Valerie asked. "Yes, it was quite natural, I think, and partly because of your manoeuvers, my poor Jack. I understand it all now. But the cause you espoused was already a doomed one, you see."

"Oh!" he almost groaned. "_You_ doomed it! Don't you feel any pity for _him_?"

Valerie continued to look at her page, silently, for a moment, and it was now indeed as though his question found some reverberating echo in herself.

But, in the silent moment, she thought it out swiftly and surely, grasping old clues.

"No, Jack," she said, and she was giving herself, as well as him, the final answer, "I don't pity him. He will never see Imogen baffled, warped, at bay,--as we have. He will always see her crowned, successful, radiant. She will count tremendously over there, far more than I ever would, because she's so different, because she cares such a lot. And Imogen must count to be radiant. She will help him in all sorts of ways, give him a new life; she will help everybody. Do you remember what Eddy said of her, that if it weren't for people of the Imogen type the cripples would die off like anything!--That was true. She is one of the people who make the wheels of the world go round. And it's a revival for a man like Sir Basil to live with such a person. With me he would have faded back into the onlooker at life; with Imogen he will live. And then, above all, quite above all, he is in love with her. I think that he fell in love with her at first sight, as Antigone, at her loveliest, except for to-night; to-night was her very loveliest--because it was so real;--she would have claimed him from me--before me--if he had come then; and her belief in herself, didn't you see, Jack, how it illumined her?--And then, Jack, and this I'm afraid you are forgetting, Imogen is a good girl, a very good girl. I can trust him to her, you know. Her object in life will be to love him in the most magnificent way possible. His happiness will be as much of an end to her as her own."

It was, perhaps, the culminating symptom of his initiation, of his transformation, when Jack, who had considered her while she spoke, standing perfectly still, his hands in his pockets, his head bent, his eyes steadily on her, now, finding nothing better to do than obey her first suggestion and go to bed, took her hand before going, put it to his lips--and his glance, as he kissed her hand, brought the tears, again, to Valerie's eyes--and said: "d.a.m.n goodness."

XXIX

Imogen was, indeed, crowned and radiant. And, safe on her eminence, recovered from the breathlessness of her rather unbecoming vigorous ascent, she found her old serenity, her old benignity, safely enfolded her once more. In looking down upon the dusty lowlands, where she had been blind and bitter, she could afford to smile over herself, even to shake her head a little over the vehemence of her own fear and courage. It was to have lacked faith, to have lacked wisdom, the showing of such vehemence; yet, who knew, without it, perhaps, she might not have escaped the nets that had been laid for her feet, for Basil's feet, too, his strong and simple nature making him helpless before sly ambushes. Jack, in declaring himself her enemy, had effectually killed the last faint wailing that had so piteously, so magnanimously, sounded on for him in her heart. He had, by his trickster's dexterity, proved to her, if she needed proof, that she had chosen the higher. A man who could so stoop--to lies--was not the man for her. To say nothing of his iniquity, his folly was apparent. For Jack had behaved like a fool, he must see that himself, in his espousal of a lost cause.

Jack as delinquent stood plain, and she would accuse no one else. In the bottom of Imogen's heart lingered, however, the suspicion that only when her mother had seen the cause as lost, the contest as useless, had she hastily a.s.sumed the dignified att.i.tude that, for the dizzy, moonlit moment, had, so humiliatingly, sealed her, Imogen, into the magic bottle. Imogen suspected that she hadn't been so wrong, nor her mother so magnanimous as had then appeared, and this secret suspicion made it the easier for her to accept the seeming, since to do that was to show herself anybody's equal in magnanimity. She was quite sure that her mother, in her shallow way, had cared for Basil, and not at all sure that she had relinquished her hope at the first symptom of his change of heart. But, though one couldn't but feel stern at the thought, one couldn't, also, repress something of pity for the miscalculation of the defeated love. To feel pity, moreover, was to show herself anybody's equal in heart;--Jack's accusations rankled.

Yes; considering all things, and in spite of the things that, she must always suspect, were hidden, her mother had behaved extremely well.

"And above all," Imogen thought, summing it up in terms at once generous and apt, "she has behaved like the gentlewoman that she is. With all her littlenesses, all her lacks, mama is essentially that." And the sweetest moments of self-justification were those in which her heart really ached a little for "poor mama," moments in which she wondered whether the love that had come to her, in her great sorrow, high among the pine woods, had ever been her mother's to lose. The wonder made her doubly secure and her mother really piteous.

It was easy, her heart stayed on such heights, to suffer very tolerantly the little stings that flew up to her from the buzzing, startled world.

Jack she did not see again, until the day of her wedding, only a month later, and then his face, showing vaguely among the shimmering crowd, seemed but an empty mask of the past. Jack departed early on the morning after her betrothal, and it was only lesser wonders that she had to face.

Mary's was the one that teased most, and Imogen might have felt some irritation had that not now been so inappropriate a sensation, before Mary's stare, a stare that seemed to resume and take in, in the moment of stupefaction, a world of new impressions. The memory of Mary staring, with her hair done in a new and becoming way, was to remain for Imogen as a symbol of the vexatious and altered, perhaps the corrupted life, that she was, after all, leaving for good in leaving her native land.

"Sir Basil!--You are going to marry Sir Basil, Imogen!" said Mary.

"Yes, dear. Does that surprise you? Haven't you, really, seen it coming?--We fancied that everyone must be guessing, while we were finding it out for ourselves," Imogen answered, ever so gently.

"No, I never saw it, never dreamed of it."

"It seemed so impossible? Why, Mary dear?"

"I don't know;--he is so much older;--he isn't an American;--you won't live in your own country;--I never imagined you marrying anyone but an American."

The deepest wonder, Imogen knew it very well, was the one she could not express:--I thought that he was in love with your mother.

Imogen smiled over the simplicity of the spoken surprises. "I don't think that the question of years separates people so at one as Basil and I," she said. "You would find how little such things meant, Mary mine, if your calm little New England heart ever came to know what a great love is. As for my country, my country will be my husband's country, but that will not make me love my old home the less, nor make me forget all the things that life has taught me here, any more than I shall be the less myself for being a bigger and better self as his wife." And Imogen looked so uplifted in saying it that poor, bewildered Mary felt that Mrs. Upton, after all, was right, one couldn't tell where rightness was. Such love as Imogen's couldn't be wrong.

All the same, she was not sorry that Imogen, all transfigured as she undoubtedly was, should be going very far away. Mary did not feel happy with Imogen any longer.

Rose took the tidings in a very unpleasant manner; but then Rose didn't count; in any circ.u.mstances her effrontery went without saying. One simply looked over it, as in this case, when it took the form of an absolute silence, a white, smiling silence.

Oddly enough, from the extreme of Rose's anger, came Eddy's chance. She didn't tell Eddy that she saw his mother as robbed and that, in silence, her heart bled for her; but she did say to him, several days after Imogen's announcement, that, yes, she would.

"I know that I should be bound to take you some day, and I'd rather do it just now when your mother has quite enough bothers to see to without having your anxieties on her mind! I'll never understand anyone so well as I do you, or quarrel with anyone so comfortably;--and besides," Rose added with characteristic impertinence, "the truth is, my dear, that I want to be your mother's daughter. It's that that has done it. I want to show her how nice a daughter can be to her. I want to take Imogen's place. I'll be an extremely bad wife, Eddy, but a good daughter-in-law. I adore your mother so much that for her sake I'll put up with you."

Eddy said that she might adore any one as much as she liked so long as she allowed him to put up with her for a lifetime. They did understand each other, these two, and Valerie, though a little troubled by the something hard and bright in their warring courtship, something that, she feared, would make their path, though always illuminated, often rough, could welcome her new daughter with real gladness.

"I know that you'll never care for me, as I do for you," said Rose, "and that you will often scold me; but your scoldings will be my religion. Don't spare them. You are my ideal, you know."

This speech, made in her presence, was, Imogen knew, intended as a cut at herself. She heard it serenely. But Rose was more vexatious than Mary in that she wasn't leaving her behind. Rose was already sparring with Eddy as to when he would take her over to England for a season of hunting. Eddy firmly held himself before her as a poor man, and when Rose dangled her own wealth before him remarked that she could, of course, go without him, if she liked. It was evident, in spite of sparring and hardness, that Rose wouldn't like at all; and evident, too, that Eddy would often be wheedled into a costly holiday. Imogen had to foresee a future of tolerance toward Rose. Their worlds would not do more than merge here and there.

Imogen had, already, very distinct ideas as to her new world. It hovered as important and political; the business of Rose's world would be its relaxation only. For Imogen would never change colors, and her frown for mere fashion would be as sad as ever. She was not to change, she was only to intensify, to become "bigger and better." And this essential stability was not contradicted by the fact that, in one or two instances, she found herself developing. She was glad, and in the presence of Mrs. Wake, gravely to renounce past errors as to the English people. Since coming to know Basil, typical of his race, its flower, as he was, she had come to see how far deeper in many respects, how far more evolved that English character was than their own,--"their," now, signifying "your." "You really saw that before I did, dear Mrs. Wake," said Imogen.

Already Imogen identified herself with her future husband so that the defects of the younger civilization seemed no longer her affair, except in so far as her understanding of them, her love of her dear country, and her new enlightenments, made her the more eager to help. And then they were all of the same race; she was very insistent on that; it was merely that the branch to which she now belonged was a "bigger and better branch." Imogen was none the less a good American for becoming so devoutly English. From her knowledge of the younger, more ardent, civilization, her long training in its n.o.blest school, she could help the old in many ways. England, in these respects, was like her Basil, before she had wakened him. Imogen felt that England, too, needed her. And there was undoubtedly a satisfaction in flashing that new world of hers, so large, so in need of her,--in flashing it, like a bright, and, it was to be hoped, a somewhat dazzling object, before the vexatiously imperturbable eyes of Mrs. Wake. Mrs. Wake's dry smile of congratulation had been almost as unpleasant as Rose's silence.