A Fountain Sealed Part 4

IV

It was an icy, sunny day, and Imogen Upton and Jack Pennington were walking up and down the gaunt wharf, not caring to take refuge from the cold in the stifling waiting-rooms. The early morning sky was still pink. The waters of the vast harbor were whitened by blocks and sheets of ice. The great city, drawn delicately on the pink in white and pearl, marched its fantastic ranges of "sky-sc.r.a.pers"--an army of giants--down to the water's edge.

And, among all the rose and gold and white, the ocean-liner, a glittering immensity of helpless strength, was being hauled and b.u.t.ted into her dock, like some harpooned sea-monster, by a swarm of blunt-nosed, agile little tugs.

Jack Pennington thought that he had never seen Imogen looking so "wonderful" as on this morning. The occasion, to him, was br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with significance. He had not expected to share it, but Imogen had spoken with such sweetness of the help that he would give her if he could be with her in her long, cold waiting, that, with touched delight, he found himself in the position of a friend so trusted, so leaned upon, that he could witness what there must be of pain and fear for her in this meeting of her new life. The old life was with them both. Her black armed her in it, as it were, made her valiant to meet the new. And for him that old life, the life menaced, though so trivially, by the arriving presence, seemed embodied in the free s.p.a.ces of the great harbor, the soaring sky of frosty rose, the grotesque splendor of the giant city, the glory, the ugliness of the country he loved, the country that made giant-like, grotesque cities, and that made Imogens.

She was the flower of it all--the flower and the so much more than flower.

He didn't care a fig, so he told himself, about the mere fact of her being beautiful, finished, in her long black furs, her face so white, her hair so gold under her little hat. She wasn't to be picked and placed high, above the swarming ugliness. No, and that was why he cared for her when he had ceased to care for so many pretty girls--her roots were deep; she shared her loveliness; she gave; she opened; she did not shut away. She was the promise for many rather than the guerdon of the few. Jack's democracy was the ripe fruit of an ancestry of high endeavor and high responsibility. The service of impersonal ends was in his blood, and no meaner task had ever been asked of him or of a long line of forebears. He had never in his own person experienced ugliness; it remained a picture, seen but not felt by him, so that it was not difficult for him to see it with the eyes of faith as glorified and uplifted. It const.i.tuted a splendid burden, an enn.o.bling duty, for those who possessed beauty, and without that grave and happy right to serve, beauty itself would lose all meaning. He often talked about democracy to Imogen. She understood what he felt about it more firmly, more surely, than he himself did; for, where he sometimes suspected himself of theory, she acted. She, too, rejoiced in the fundamental sameness of the human family that banded it together in, essentially, the same great adventure--the adventure of the soul.

Imogen understood; Imogen rejoiced; Imogen was bound on that adventure--not only with him, but, and it was this that gave those wide wings to his feeling for her, with _them_--with all the vast brotherhood of humanity.

Now and then, to be sure, faint echoes in her of her father, touches of youthful a.s.surance, youthful grandiloquence, stirred the young man's sense of humor; but it was quickly quelled by an irradiating tenderness that showed her limitations as symptoms of an influence that, in its foolish aspects, he would not have had her too clearly recognize; her beautiful, filial devotion more than compensated for her filial blindness--nay, sanctified it; and her heavenly face had but to turn on him for him to envelop all her little solemnities and importances in a comprehending reverence. Jack thought Imogen's face very heavenly. He was an artist by profession, as we have said, taking himself rather seriously, too, but the artistic perception was so strongly colored by ethical and intellectual preoccupations that the spontaneous satisfaction in the Eternal Now of mere beauty was rarely his. Certainly he saw the flower-like texture of Imogen's skin; the way in which the light azured its whiteness and slid upon its child-like surfaces. He saw the long oval of the face, the firm and gentle lips, drawn with a delicate amplitude, the broad hazel eyes set under a level sweep of dark eyebrow and outlined, not shadowed, so clear, so wide they were, by the dark lashes. But all the fresh loveliness of line, surface, color, remained an intellectual appreciation; while what touched, what penetrated, were the a.n.a.logies she suggested, the lovely soul that the lovely face vouched for. The oval of her face and the charming squaring of her eyes, so candid, so unmysterious, made him think of a Botticelli Madonna; and her long, narrow hands, with their square finger-tips, might have been the hands of a Botticelli angel holding a votive offering of fruit and flowers. His mind seldom rested in her beauty, pa.s.sing at once through it to what it expressed of purity, strength and serenity. It expressed so much of these that he had never paused at the portals, as it were, to feel the defects of her face. Imogen's nose was too small; neat rather than beautiful. Her eyes, with the porcelain-like quality of their white, the jewel-like color of their irises, were over-large; and when she smiled, which she did often, though with more gentleness than gaiety, she showed an over-s.p.a.cious expanse of large white teeth. For the rest, Imogen's figure was that of the typical well-groomed, well-trained, American girl, long-limbed, slender, rounded; in her carriage a girlish air of consciousness; the poise of her broad shoulders and slender hips expressing at once hygienic and fashionable ideals that reproved slack gaits and outlines. As they walked, as they talked, watching the slow advance of the great steamer; as their eyes rested calmly and intelligently on each other, one could see that the girl's relation to this dear friend was untouched by any trace of coquetry and that his feeling for her, if deep, was under most perfect control.

"It's over a year, now, since I saw mama," Imogen was saying, as they turned again from a long scrutiny of the crowded decks--the distance was as yet too great for individual recognition. "She didn't come over this summer as usual,--poor dear, how bitterly she must regret that now, though it was hardly her fault, papa and I fixed on our Western trip for the summer. It seems a very long time to me."

"And to me," said Jack. "It's only a year since I came really to know you; but how much longer it seems than that."

"It's strange that we should know each other so well and yet that you have never seen my mother," said Imogen. "Is that she? No, she is not so tall.

Poor darling, how tired and sad she must be."

"You are tired and sad, too," said Jack.

"Ah, but I am young--youth can bear so much better. And, besides, I don't think that my sadness would ever be like mama's. You see, in a way, I have so much more in my life. I should never sit down in my sadness and let it overwhelm me. I should use it, always. It is strange that grief should so often make people selfish. It ought, rather, to open doors for us and give us wider visions."

He was so sure that it had performed these offices for her, looking, as he now looked, at her delicate profile, turned from him while she gazed toward the ship, that he was barely conscious of the little tremor of amus.e.m.e.nt that went through him for the triteness of her speech. Such triteness was beautiful when it expressed such reality.

"I suppose that you will count for more, now, in your mother's life," he said,--that Imogen should, seemingly, have counted for so little had been the frequent subject of his indignant broodings. "She will make you her object."

Imogen smiled a little. "Isn't it more likely that I shall make her mine?

one of mine? But you don't know mama yet. She is, in a way, very lovely--but so much of a child. So much younger--it seems funny to say it, but it's true--than I am."

"Littler," Jack amended, "not younger."

But Imogen, while accepting the amendment, wouldn't accept the negation.

"Both, I'm afraid," she sighed.

"Will she like it over here?" Jack mused more than questioned.

"Hardly, since she has always lived as little here as she could manage."

"Perhaps she will want to take you back to England," he surmised, conscious, while he spoke the almost humorous words, of a very firm determination that she shouldn't do so.

Imogen paused in her walk at this, fixing upon him eyes very grave indeed.

"Take me back to England? Do you really think that I would consent to that?

Surely you know me better, Jack?"

"I think I do. Only you might yield against your will, if she insisted."

"Surely you know me well enough to know that I would never yield against my will, if I knew that my will was right. I might sacrifice a great deal for mama--I am prepared to--but never that; Never," Imogen repeated. "There are some things that one must not sacrifice. Her living in England is a whim; my living in my own country is part of my religion."

"I know, of course, dear Imogen. But," Jack was argumentative, "as to sacrifice, say that it was asked of you, by right. Say, for instance, that you married a man who had to take you out of your own country?"

She smiled a little at the stupid surmise. "That hardly applies. Besides, I would never marry a man who was not one of my own people, who was not a part--as I am a part--of the Whole I live for. My life is here, all its meaning is here--you know it--just as yours is."

"I love to know it--I was only teasing you."

He loved to know it, of course. Yet, while it answered to all his own theories that the person should be so much less to her than the idea the person lived for, he couldn't but feel at times, with a rueful sense of unworthiness, that this rare capacity in her might apply in most unwelcome fashion to his own case. In Jack, the deep wells of feeling and emotion were barred and bolted over by a whole complicated system of reticences; by a careful sense of responsibility, not only toward others, but toward himself; by a disciplined self-control that was a second nature. But, he could see it well enough, if such, deep wells there were in Imogen, they, as yet, were in no need of barring and bolting. Her eyes could show a quiet acceptance of homage, a placid conviction of power, a tender sympathy, but the depth and trouble of emotion was not yet in them. He often suspected that he was nearer to her when he talked to her of causes than when he ventured, now and then, to talk about his feelings. There was always the uncomfortable surmise that the man who could offer a more equipped faculty for the adventure of the soul, might altogether outdistance him with Imogen. By any emotion, any appeal or pa.s.sion that he might show, she would remain, so his intuition at moments told him, quite unbiased; while she weighed simply worth against worth, and weight--in the sense of strength of soul--against weight. And it was this intuition that made self-control and reticence easier than they might otherwise have been. His theories might a.s.sure him that such integrity of purpose was magnificent; his manly common-sense told him that in a wife one wanted to be sure of the taint of personal preference; so that, while he knew that he would never need to weigh Imogen's worth against anybody else's, he watched and waited until some unawakened capacity in her should be able happily to respond to the more human aspects of life. Meanwhile the steamer had softly glided into the dock and the two young people at last descried upon the crowded decks the tall, familiar figure of Eddy Upton, like Imogen in his fairness, clearness, but with a more masculine jut of nose and chin, sharper lines of brow and cheek and lip. And beside Eddy--Jack hardly needed the controlled quiet of Imogen's "There's mama" to identify the figure in black.

She leaned there, high and far, on the deck of the great steamer that loomed above their heads, almost ominous in its gigantic bulk and darkness; she leaned there against the rosy sky, her face intent, searching, bent upon the fluttering, shouting throng beneath; and for Jack, in this first impression of her, before she had yet found Imogen, there was something pathetic in the earnestness of her searching gaze, something that softened the rigors of his disapprobation. But, already, too, he fancied that he caught the expected note of the frivolous in the outline of her fur-lined coat, in the grace of her little hat.

Still she sought, her face pale and grave, while, with an imperceptible movement, the steamer glided forward, and now, as Imogen raised her m.u.f.f in a long, steady wave, her eyes at last found her daughter and, smiling, smiling eagerly down upon them, she leaned far over the deck to wave her answer. She put her hand on her son's arm, pointing them out to him, and Eddy, also finding them, smiled too, but with his rather cool kindness, raising his hat and giving Jack a recognizing nod. It was then as if he introduced Jack. Jack saw her question, saw him a.s.sent, and her smile went from Imogen to him enveloping him with its mild radiance.

"She is very lovely, your mother, as you say," Jack commented, feeling a little breathless over this silent meeting of forces that he must think of as hostile, and finding nothing better to say.

Imogen, who had continued steadily to wave her m.u.f.f, welcoming, but for her part unsmiling, answered, "Yes."

"I hope that she won't mind my being here, in the way, after a fashion,"

said Jack.

"She won't mind," said Imogen.

He knew the significance of her voice; displeasure was in its gentleness, a quiet endurance of distress. It struck him then, in a moment, that it was rather out of place for Mrs. Upton to smile so radiantly at such a home-coming. Not that the smile had been a gay one. It had shone out after her search for her daughter's face; for the finding of it and for him it had continued to shine. It was like sunlight on a sad white day of mist; it did not dispel mournfulness, it seemed only to irradiate it. But--to have smiled at all. With Imogen's eyes he saw, suddenly, that tears would have been the more appropriate greeting and, in looking back at the girl once more, he saw that her own, as if in vicarious atonement, were running down her cheeks. She, then, felt a doubled suffering and his heart hardened against the woman who had caused it.

The two travelers had disappeared and the decks were filled with the jostling hurry of final departure. Jack and Imogen moved to take their places by the long gangway that slanted up from the dock.

He said nothing to her of her tears, silent before this subtle grief; perhaps, for all his love and sympathy, a little disconcerted by its demonstration, and it was Imogen who spoke, murmuring, as they stood together, looking up, "Poor, poor papa."

Yes, that had been the hurt, to see her dead put aside, almost forgotten, in the mother's over-facile smile.

The pa.s.sengers came trooping down the gangway, with an odd buoyancy of step caused by the steep incline, and Jack, for all his expectancy, had eyes, appreciative and critical, for the procession of his country-people. Stout, short men, embodying purely economic functions, with rudimentary features, slightly embossed, as it were, upon pouch-like faces. Thin, young men, whose lean countenances had somewhat the aspect of steely machinery, apt for swift, ruthless, utilitarian processes. Bloodless old men, many of whom looked like withered, weary children adorned with whitened hair.

The average manhood of America, with its general air of cheap and hasty growth, but varied here and there by a higher type; an athletic collegian, auspiciously Grecian in length of limb, width of brow, deep placidity of eye; varied by a ma.s.sive senatorial head or so, tolerant, humorous, sagacious; varied by a stalwart Westerner, and by the weedier scholar, sensitive, self-conscious, too much of the spiritual and too little of the animal in the meager body and over-intelligent face.

There was a certain discrepancy, in dress and bodily well-being, between the feminine and the masculine portion of the procession; many of the heavy matrons, wide-hipped, well-corseted, benignant and commanding of mien, were ominously suggestive, followed as they were by their fragile husbands, of the female spider and her doomed, inferior, though necessary, mate.

The young girls of the happier type resembled Imogen Upton in grace, in strength, in calm and in a.s.surance; the less fortunate were sharp, sallow, anxious-eyed; and the children were either rosy, well-mannered, and confident, or ill-mannered, over-mature, but also, always, confident.

Highly equipped with every graceful quality of his race, not a touch of the male spider about him, Eddy's head appeared at last, proud, delicate and strong. His mother, carrying a small dog, was on his arm, and, as she emerged before the eyes that watched for her, she was smiling again at something that Eddy had said to her. Then her eyes found them, Jack and Imogen, so near now, sentinels before the old life, that her smile, her aspect, her very loveliness, seemed to menace, and Jack felt that she caught a new gravity from the stern gentleness of Imogen's gaze; that she adjusted her features to meet it; that, with a little shock, she recognized the traces of weeping on her daughter's face and saw, in his own intentionally hardened look, that she had tuned herself to a wrong pitch and had been, all unconsciously, jarring.

He couldn't but own that her readjustment, if readjustment it was, was very beautifully done. Tears rose in her eyes, too. He saw, as she neared them, that her face was pale and weary; it looked ever so gently, ever so sadly, perhaps almost timidly, at her daughter, and as she came to them she put out her hand to Imogen, laid hold on her and held her without speaking while they all moved away together.

The tears of quick sympathy had risen to Jack's own eyes and he stood apart while the mother and daughter kissed. After that, and when they had gone on a little before him and Eddy, Mrs. Upton turned to him, and if she readjusted herself she didn't, as it were, retract, for the smile again rested on him while Eddy presented him to her. He saw then that she had suffered, though with a suffering different from any that he would have thought of as obvious. How or what she had suffered he could not tell, but the pale, weary features, for all their smile, rea.s.sured him. She wasn't, at all events, a heartless, a flippant woman.

Eddy and Mrs. Upton's maid remained behind to do battle with the custom-house, and Jack, with Imogen and her mother, got into the capacious cab that was waiting for them.

The streets in this mean quarter were deep in mud. The snow everywhere had been trampled into liquid blackness, and the gaunt horses that galloped along the wharfs dragging noisy vans and carts were splashed all over. It might have been some sordid quarter of an Italian town that they drove through, so oddly foreign were the disheveled houses, their predominant color a heavy, glaring red. Men in white uniforms were shoveling snow from the pavements. The many negro countenances in the hurrying crowds showed blue tints in the bitter air. Coming suddenly to a wide, mean avenue, when the carriage lurched and swayed on the street-car tracks, they heard, mingled in an inconceivably ugly uproar, the crash and whine of the cable-cars about them, and the thunder of the elevated-railway above their heads.

Jack, sensitive to others' impressions, wondered if this tumultuous ugliness made more dreary to Mrs. Upton the dreary circ.u.mstances of her home-coming. There was no mitigation of dreariness to be hoped for from Imogen, who was probably absorbed in her own bitter reflections. She gazed steadily out of the window, replying only with quiet monosyllables to her mother's tentative questions; her face keeping its look of endurance. One could infer from it that had she not so controlled herself she must have wept, and sitting before the mother and daughter Jack felt much awkwardness in his position. If their meeting were not to be one with more conventional surface he really ought not to have been invited to share it. Imogen, poor darling, had all his sympathy; she hadn't reckoned with the difficulties; she hadn't reckoned with that hurting smile, with the sharp reawakening of the vicarious sense of wrong; but, all the same, before her look, her silence, he could but feel for her mother, and feel, too, a keener discomfort from the fact that his inopportune presence must make Mrs.

Upton's discomfort the greater.