A Fountain Sealed Part 41

And with the thought, girlishly, still girlishly, she hid her face upon her arms as she stood there, murmuring:--"Ah, I hate, I hate getting old."

A step at the door roused her. She turned to see Jack entering.

Jack looked very nice in the tans and russets of his riding-tweeds and gaiters. The chill air had brought a clear color to his cheeks; the pale gold of his hair,--one unruly lock, as usual, over-long, lying across his forehead,--shone like sunlight; his gray eyes looked as deep and limpid as a mountain pool.

Valerie was very, very glad to see him. He embodied the elixir, the color, the freshness of the world to-day: and oh how young--how young--how fortunately, beautifully young he looked;--that was the thought that met him from the contrast of the mirror.

She gave him her hands in welcome, and they sat down near a window where the sunlight fell upon them and the breeze blew in upon them, she on a little sofa, among chintz cushions, he on a low chair beside her; and while they talked, that excitement, that pain and expectancy grew in Jack.

The summer was over and, soon, it must be, she would go. With a wave of sadness that sucked him back and swept him forward in a long, sure ache, came the knowledge, deeper than before, of his own desolation. But, sitting there beside her in the October sunlight; feeling, with the instinct, so quick, so sensitive in him, that it was in sadness he had found her, the desolation wasn't so much for himself as for her, what she represented and stood for. He, too, seeing her face with the blooming rose beside it, had known her piercing thought.

She was going; but in other senses, too. She had begun to go; and all the sacrifices, the relinquishments, the acceptances of the summer, were the first steps of departure. She had done with things and he, who had not yet done with them, was left behind. Already the signs of distance were upon her--he saw them as she had seen them--her distance from the world of youth, of hope, of effort.

A thin veil, like the sad-sweet haze over the purpling hills, seemed to waver between them; the veil that, for all its melting elusiveness, parts implacably one generation from another. Its dimness seemed to rest on her bright hair and to hover in her bright eyes; to soften, as with a faint melancholy, the brightness of her smile. And it was as if he saw her, with a little sigh, unclasp her hands, that had clung to what she fancied to be still her share of life,--unclasp her hands, look round her with a slight amaze at the changed season where she found herself, and, after the soundless pause of recognition, bend her head consentingly to the quiet, obliterating snows of age. And once more his own change, his own initiation to subtler standards, was marked by the fact that when the old, ethical self, still over-glib with its a.s.surances, tried to urge upon him that all was for the best in a wonderful world, ventured to murmur an axiom or so as to the grace, the dignity, the added spiritual significance of old age, the new self, awakened to tragedy, turned angry eyes upon that vision of the rose in the devastated garden, and once more muttered, in silence:--"d.a.m.n!"

They had talked of the past and of the coming marriage, very superficially, in their outer aspects; they had talked of his summer wanderings and of the Pakenhams' visit to Vermont. She had given him tea and she had told him of her plans for the winter;--she had given up the New York house, and had taken a little flat near Mrs. Wake's, that she was going to move to in a few days from now. And Jack said at last, feeling that with the words he dived from shallows into deeps:--"And--when are you going back?--back to England?"

"Going back?"--She repeated his words with vagueness.

"Yes; to where you've always liked to live."

"Yes; I liked living there," said Valerie, still with vagueness in her contemplative "yes."

"And still like it."

She seemed to consider. "Things have changed, you know. It was change I used to want, I looked for it, perhaps mistakenly. Now it has come of itself. And I feel a great unwillingness to move on again."

The poignant vision of something bruised, dimmed, listless, was with him, and it was odd to hear himself urging:--"But in the meantime, you, too, have changed. The whole thing over here, the thing we so care for, isn't yours. You don't really care about it much, if at all. It doesn't really please you. It gives you with effort what you can get with ease, over there, and it must jar on you, often. We are young; crude; all the over-obvious things that are always said of us; our enthusiasms are too facile; our standards of achievement, in the things you care for, rather second-rate; oh, you know well enough what I mean. We are not crystallized yet into a shape that's really comfortable for a person like you:--perhaps we never shall be; perhaps I hope that we never shall be. So why shouldn't you go to a place where you can have all the things you like?"

She listened to him in silence, with, at the end, a slight smile for the exact.i.tude of his: "Perhaps I hope that we never shall be;"--and she paused now as if his portrayal of her own wants required consideration. "Perhaps,"

she said at length, "perhaps I never cared so much about all those things."

"Oh, but you do," said Jack with conviction.

"You mean, I suppose, all the things people over here go away so much to get. No, I don't think so. It was never really that. I don't think"--and she seemed to be thinking it out for herself as well as for him--"that I've ever been so conscious of standards--crystallizations--the relative values and forms of things. What I wanted was freedom. Not that I was ever oppressed or ill-treated, far from it;--but I was too--uncomfortable. I was like a bird forced to live like a fish, or perhaps we had better say, like a fish forced to live like a bird. That was why I went. I couldn't breathe.

And, yes, I like the life over there. It's very easy and gliding; it protects you from jars; it gives you beauty for the asking;--here we have to make it as a rule. I like the people, too, and their unconsciousness.

One likes us, you know, Jack, for what is conscious in us--and it's so much that there's hardly a bit of us that isn't conscious. We know our way all over ourselves, as it were, and can put all of ourselves into the window if we want someone else to know us. One often likes them for their unconsciousness, for all the things behind the window, all the things they know nothing at all about, the things that are instinctive, background things. It makes a more peaceful feeling. One can wander about dim rooms, as it were, and rest in them; one doesn't have to recognize, and respond so much. Yes, I shall miss it all, in a great many ways. But I like it here, too. For one thing, there is a great deal more to do."

Jack, in some bewilderment, was grasping at clues. One was that, as he had long ago learned of her, she was incapable of phrases, even when they were sincere, incapable of dramatizing herself, even if her situation lent itself to tragic interpretations. Uncomfortable?--was that all that she found to say of her life, her suffocating life, among the fishes? She could put it aside with that. And as for the rest, he realized suddenly, with a new illumination--at what a late date it was for him to reach it; he, who had thought that he knew her so well!--that she cared less, in reality, for all those "things" lacking in the life of her native land than the bulk of her conscious, anxious countrymen. Cared not enough, his old self of judgment and moral apprais.e.m.e.nt would have p.r.o.nounced. She wasn't intellectual, nor was she esthetic; that was the funny part of it, about a person whose whole being diffused a sense of completeness that was like a perfume. Art, culture, a complicated social life, being on the top of things, as it were, were not the objects of her concentration. It was indeed her indifference to them, her independence of them, that made her, for his wider consciousness, oddly un-American.

In the midst of bewilderment and illumination one thing stood clear, a trembling joy; he had to make a.s.surance doubly sure. "If you are not going away, what _will_ you do?"

"I don't know";--he would, once, have rebuked the smile with which she said it as indolent;--"I wasn't thinking of anything definite, for myself. I'll watch other people do--you, for instance, Jack. I shall spend most of my time here in the country; New York is so expensive; I shall garden--wait till you see what I make of this in a few years' time; I shall look after Rose and Eddy--at a tactful distance."

"But your wider life? Your many friends, over there?" Jack still protested, fearing that he saw more clearly than she to what a widow with a tiny, crippled fortune was consigning herself in this country of the young and striving. "You need gaiety, brilliancy, big, bright vistas." It was strange to hear himself urging his thought for her against that inner throb. Again she gave him her grave, brief smile. "You forget, Jack, that I'm--cured.

I'm quite old enough not to mind giving up."

The warm, consoling a.s.surance was with him, of her presence near his life; but under it the excitement, the pain, had so risen that he wondered if she did not read them in his eyes.

The evening was growing late; the sky had turned to a pale, translucent gold, streaked, over the horizon, by thin, cold, lilac-colored clouds. He must go, leaving her there, alone, and, in so doing, he would leave something else behind him forever. For it was now, as the veil fell upon her, as the evening fell over the wide earth, it was now or never that he could receive the last illumination. He hardly saw clearly what that might be; it wavered like a hovering light behind the mist.

He rose and walked up and down the room a little; pausing to look from the windows at the golden sky; pausing to look, now and then, at her, sitting there in her long, black dress, vaguely shadowed on the outer light, smiling, tranquil, yet sad, so sad.

"So, our summer is at an end," he said, turning at last from the window.

"The air has a frosty tang already. I suppose I must be off. I shall not see you again until New York. I'm glad--I'm glad that you are to be there"; and now he stammered suddenly, a little--"more glad than I can say."

"Thanks, Jack," she answered, her eyes fondly dwelling on him. "You are one of the things I would not like to leave."

Again he walked up and down, and seemed to hear the steady flow of that still, deep excitement. Why, above it, should he say silly, meaningless words, that were like a bridge thrown over it to lead him from her?

"I want to tell you one thing, just one, before I go," he said. He knew that, with his sudden resolution, his voice had changed and, to quiet himself, he stood before her and put both hands on the back of a chair that was between them. He couldn't go on building that bridge. He must dare something, even if something else he must not dare--unless, unless she let him. "I must tell you that you are the most enchanting person I have ever known."

She looked at him quietly, though she was startled, not quite understanding, and she said a little sadly: "Only that, Jack?"

"Yes, only that, for you, because you don't need the trite, obvious labels that one affixes to other people. You don't need me to say that you are good or true or brave;--it's like a delicate seal that comprises and expresses everything,--the trite things and the strange, lovely things--when I say that you are enchanting." He held his mind, so conscious, under the words, of what he must not say, to the intellectual preoccupation of making her see, at all events, just what the words he could say meant.

But as his voice rang, tense, vibrant as a tightened cord in the still room, as his eyes sank into hers, Valerie felt in her own dying youth the sudden echo to all he dared not say.

She had never seen, quick as she was to see the meaning behind words and looks. She suspected that he, also, had never seen it clearly till now.

Other claims had dropped from them; the world was gone; they were alone, his eyes on hers; and between them was the magic of life.

Yes, she had it still, the gift, the compelling charm. His eyes in their young strength and fear and adoration called to her life, and with a touch, a look, she could bring to it this renewal and this solace. And, behind her sorrow, her veil, her relinquishment, Valerie was deeply thrilled.

The thrill went through her, but even while she knew it, it hardly moved her. No; the relinquishment had been too deep. She had lost forever, in losing the other. That had been to turn her back on life, or, rather, to see it turn its back on her, forever. Not without an ugly crash of inner, twisted discord could she step once more from the place of snow, or hold out her hand to love.

All his life was before him, but for her--; for her it was finished. And as she mastered the thrill, as she turned from the vision of what his eyes besought and promised, a flow of pity, pity for his youth and pain and for all the long way he was yet to go, filled her, bringing peace, even while the sweetness of the unsought, undreamed of offering made her smile again, a trembling smile.

"Dear Jack, thank you," she said.

Suddenly, before her smile, her look, he flushed deeply, taking from her eyes what his own full meaning had been. Already it was in the past, the still-born hope; it was dead before he gazed upon it; but he must hear the death-warrant from her lips, it was not enough to see it, so gentle, so pitiful, so loving, in her eyes, and he heard himself stammering:--"You-- you haven't anything else you can say to me?"

She had found her answer in a moment, and now indeed she was at the helm, steering them both past white sh.o.r.es, set in such depths of magical blue, white sh.o.r.es where sirens sang. Never could they land there, never listen to the song. And already she seemed to hear it, as if from a far distance, ringing, sharp and strange with the swiftness of their flight, as she replied: "Nothing else, dear Jack, except that I wish you were my son."

The enchanted island had sunk below the horizon. They were landed, and on the safest, sanest, sh.o.r.es. She knew that she had achieved her own place, and that from it, secure, above him, the veil between them, her smile was the smile of motherhood. To smile so was to put before him finally the fact that her enchantment contradicted and helplessly lured him to forget. She would never forget it now, nor could he. She was Imogen's mother, and she was old enough to be his.

From her smile, her eyes, common-sense flooded Jack, kind, yet stinging, too, savoring of a rescue from some hidden danger,--not his--not his--his was none of the common-sense,--but hers. He might had she let him, have so dislocated her life.

He was scarlet, stammering. He knew that he hid nothing from her now, that he didn't want or need to hide anything. Those benign, maternal eyes would understand. And he smiled, too, but also with a trembling smile, as he reached out to her hand, holding it tightly and saying, gazing at her:--"I love you so."

Her hand held his, in farewell now, but her look up at him promised everything, everything for the future,--except the one now shrouded thing.

"And I love you, dear Jack," she said. "You have taken the place of--almost everything."

And then, for she saw the tears in his eyes, and knew that his heart was bleeding, not for himself alone, she rose and took his head between her hands, and, like a mother, kissed him above his eyes.

When he had left her,--and they said no further word,--Valerie did not again relapse into a despondent att.i.tude.