A Fountain Sealed Part 6

"The mistakes and sorrows were in her, not in the soil," said Imogen; "but don't think that though I find it hard, I don't face it; don't think that through it all I haven't my faith. That is just what I am going to do: give her time, and help her to grow with all the strength and love there is in me."

Something naughty, something rebellious and dissatisfied in him was vaguely stirring and muttering; he feared that she might see into him again and give it a name, although he could only have given it the old name of a humorous impatience with her a.s.sured rightness. Really, she was so over-right that she almost irked and irritated him, dear and beloved as she was. One could only call it over-rightness, for wasn't what she said the simple truth, just as he had always seen it, just as she had always known that, with her, he saw it? She had this queer, light burden suddenly on her hands, so much more of a burden for being so light, and if her own weight and wisdom became a little too emphatic in dealing with it, how could he reproach her? He didn't reproach her, of course; but he was afraid lest she should see that he found her, well, a little funny.

"What does she do with herself?" he asked, turning hastily from his consciousness of amus.e.m.e.nt.

Imogen's pearly face, bent on him with such confidence, made him, once more, ashamed of himself.

"She has seen a good many of her friends. We have had quite a stream of fashionable, furbelowed dames trooping up the steps; very few of them people that papa and I cared to keep in touch with; you know his dislike for the merely pleasure-seeking side of life. And she has seen the dear Delancy Pottses, too, and was very nice to them, one of the cases of seeming to accept; I saw well enough that they were no more to her than quaint insects she must do her duty by. And she has been very busy with business, closeted every day with Mr. Haliwell. And she takes a walk with me when I can spare the time, and for the rest of the day she sits in her room dressed in a wonderful tea-gown and reads French memoirs, just as she used always to do."

Jack was smiling, amused, now, in no way that needed hiding, by her smooth flow of description. "You must take her down to the girls' club some day,"

he suggested, "and to see your cripples and all the rest of it. Get her interested, you know; give her something else to think of besides French memoirs."

"Indeed, I'm going to try to. Though among my girls I'm not sure that she would be a very wise experiment. Such an _ondulee_, _parfumee_, polished person with such fashionable mourning would be, perhaps, a little resented."

"You dress very charmingly, yourself, my dear Imogen."

"Oh, but quite differently. Mamma's is fashion at its very flower of subtle discretion. My clothes, why, they are of any time you will." She swept aside her wing-like sleeves to show the Madonna-like lines of her dress. "A factory girl could wear just the same shape if she wanted to."

"And she doesn't want to, foolish girl? She wants to wear your mother's kind instead?"

"She would dimly recognize it as the unattainable perfection of what she wants. It would pierce."

"Make for envy, you think?"

"Well, I can't see that she would do them any _good_," said Imogen, now altogether in her lighter, happier mood, "but since they may do _her_ good I must, I think, take her there some day."

"And am I to do her some good? Am I to see her to-night?" Jack asked, feeling that though her humor a little jarred on him he could do nothing better than echo it. Imogen, now, had one of her frankest, prettiest looks.

"Do you know, she is almost too discreet, poor dear," she said. "She wants me to see that she perfectly understands and sympathizes with the American freedom as to friendships between men and women, so that she vacates the drawing-room for my people just as a farmer's wife would do for her daughter's young men. She hasn't asked me even a question about you, Jack!"

Her gaiety so lifted and warmed him that he was prompted to say that Mrs.

Upton would have to, very soon, if the answer to a certain question that he wanted to ask Imogen were what he hoped for. But the jocund atmosphere of their talk seemed unfit for such a grave allusion and he repressed the sally.

VI

When Jack went away, after tea, Imogen remained sitting on the sofa, looking up from time to time at the two portraits, while thoughts, quiet and mournful, but not distressing, pa.s.sed through her mind. An interview with Jack usually left her lapped about with a warm sense of security; she couldn't feel desolate, even with the greatness of her loss so upon her, when such devotion surrounded her. One deep need of her was gone, but another was there. Life, as she felt it, would have little meaning for her if it had not brought to her deep needs that she, and she alone, could satisfy. With Jack's devotion and Jack's need to sustain her, it wasn't difficult to bear with a b.u.t.terfly. One had only to stand serenely in one's place and watch it hover. It was, after all, as if she had strung herself to an att.i.tude of strength only to find that no weight was to come crushing down upon her. The pain was that of feeling her mother so light.

"Poor papa," Imogen murmured more than once, as she gazed up into the steady eyes; "what a fate it was for you--to be hurt all your life by a b.u.t.terfly." But he had been far, far too big to let it spoil anything. He turned all pain to spiritual uses. What sorrow there was had always been, most of all, for her.

And then--and here was the balm that had perfumed all her grief with its sacred aroma--she, Imogen, had been there to fill the emptiness for him. She had always been there, it seemed to her, as, in her quiet, sad retrospect, she looked back, now, to the very beginnings of consciousness.

From the first she had felt that her place was by his side; that, together they stood for something and against somebody. In this very room, so unchanged--she could even remember the same dull thump of the bronze clock, the blazing fire, the crimson curtains drawn on a snowy street,--had happened the earliest of the episodes that her memory recalled as having so placed her, so defined her att.i.tude, even for her almost babyish apprehension. She had brought down her dolls from her nursery, after tea, and ranged them on the sofa, while her father walked up and down the room, his hands in his pockets, his head thrown back, reciting something to himself, some poem, or stately fragment of antique oratory. He paused now and then as he pa.s.sed her and laid his hand upon her head and smiled down at her. Then the lovely lady of the portrait,--just like the portrait in Imogen's recollection,--had come, all in white, with wonderful white shoulders, holding a fan and long white gloves in her hand, and, looking round from her dolls, small Imogen had known in a moment that displeasure was in the air. "You are not dressed!" Those had been her mother's first words as she paused on the threshold; and then, echoing her father's words with amazement and anger, "You are not coming!"

The dialogue that followed, vivid on her mother's side as sparks struck from steel, mild as milk on her father's, had been lost upon her; but through it all she had felt that he must be right, in his gentleness, and that she, in her vividness, must be wrong. She felt that for herself, even before, turning as if from an unseemly contest, her father said, looking down at her with a smile that had a twinge of tension, "_You_ would rather go and see sick and sorry people who wanted you, than the selfish, the foolish, the overfed,--wouldn't you, beautiful little one?"

She had answered quickly, "Yes, papa," and had kept her eyes on him, not looking at her mother, knowing in her childish soul that in so answering, so looking, she shared some triumph with him.

"I'll say you're suddenly ill, then?" had come her mother's voice, but with a deadened note, as though she knew herself defeated.

"Lie? No. I must ask you, Valerie, never to lie for me. Say the truth, that I must go to a friend who needs me; the truth won't hurt them."

"But it's unbelievable, your breaking a dinner engagement, at the last hour, for such a reason," the wife had said.

"Unbelievable, I've no doubt, to the foolish, the selfish, the over-fed.

Social conventions and social ideals will always go down for me, Valerie, before realities, such realities as brotherhood and the need of a lonely human soul."

While he spoke he had lifted, gently, Imogen's long, fair curls, and smoothed her head, his eyes still holding her eyes, and when her mother turned sharply and swept out of the room, the sense of united triumph had made him bend down to her and made her stretch her arms tip to him, so that, in their long embrace, he seemed to consecrate her to those "realities" that the pretty, foolish mother flouted. That had been her initiation and her consecration.

After that, it could not have been many years after, though she had brought to it a far more understanding observation, the next scene that came up for her was a wrangle at lunch one day, over the Delancy Pottses--if wrangle it could be called when one was so light and the other so softly stern. Imogen by this time had been old enough to know for what the Pottses counted. They were discoveries of her father's, Mr. Potts a valuable henchman in that fight for realities to which her father's life was dedicated. Mr. Potts wrote articles in ethical reviews about her father's books--they never seemed to be noticed anywhere else--and about his many projects for reform and philanthropy. Both he and Mrs. Potts adored her father. He lent them, indeed, all their significance; they were there, as it were, only for the purpose of crystallizing around his magnetic center. And of these good people her mother had said, in her crisp, merry voice, "I hate 'em,"--disposing of the whole question of value, flipping the Pottses away into s.p.a.ce, as it were, and separating herself from any interest in them.

Even then little Imogen had comprehendingly shared her father's still indignation for such levity. Hate the excellent Pottses, who wrote so beautifully of her father's books, so worshiped all that he was and did, so tenderly cherished her small self? Imogen felt the old reprobation as sharply as ever, though the Pottses had become, to her mature insight, rather burdensome, the poor, good, dull, pretentious dears, and would be more so, now that their only brilliant function, that of punctually, coruscatingly, and in the public press, adoring her father, had been taken from them. One need have no illusion as to the quality of their note; it lacked distinction, serving only, in its unmodulated vehemence, the drum-like purpose of calling attention to great matters, of reverberating, so one hoped, through lethargic consciousness.

But Imogen loved the Pottses, so she told herself. To be sure of loving the Pottses was a sort of pulse by which one tested one's moral health.

She still went religiously at least twice in every winter to their receptions--funny, funny affairs, she had to own it--with a kindly smile and a pleasant sense of benign onlooking at oddity. One met there young girls dressed in the strangest ways and affecting the manners of budding Margaret Fullers--young writers or musicians or social workers, and funny frowsy, solemn young men who talked, usually with defective accents, about socialism and the larger life over ample platefuls of ice-cream. Sweetness and light, as Mrs. Potts told Imogen, was the note she tried for in her reunions, and high endeavor and brotherly love.

Mrs. Potts was a small, stout woman, who held herself very straight indeed; her hands, on festive occasions, folded on a lace handkerchief before her.

She had smooth, black hair, parted and coiled behind, and a fat face, pale fawn-color in tint, encompa.s.sing with waste of cheek and chin such a small group of features--the small, straight nose, the small, sharp eyes, the small, smiling mouth--all placed too high, and spanned, held together, as it were, by a _pince-nez_ firmly planted, like a bow-shaped ornament pinning a cl.u.s.ter of minute trinkets on a large cushion.

Mr. Delancy Potts was tall, limp, blond, and, from years of only dubious recognition, rather querulous. He had a solemn eye under a fringe of whitened eyebrow, a long nose, that his wife often fondly alluded to as "aristocratic" (they were keen on "blood," the Delancy Pottses), and a very retreating chin that one saw sometimes in disastrous silhouette against the light. Draped in the flowing fullness of hair and beard, his face showed a pseudo-dignity.

Imogen saw the Pottses with a very candid eye, and her mind drifted from that distant disposal of them to the contrast of the recent meeting, recalling their gestures and postures as they sat, with an uneasy a.s.sumption of ease, before her mother, of whom, for so many years, they had disapproved more, almost, than they disapproved of munic.i.p.al corruption and "the smart set." As onlooker she had been forced to own that her mother's manner toward them had been quite perfect. She had accepted them as her husband's mourners; had accepted them as Imogen's friends; had, indeed, so thoroughly accepted them, in whatever capacity they were offered to her, that Imogen felt that a slight enlightenment would be necessary, and that her mother must be made to feel that her own, even her father's acceptance of the Pottses, had had always its reservations.

And some acceptances, some atonements, came too late. The Pottses had not been the only members of the little circle gathered about her father who had called forth her mother's wounding levity. She had taken refuge on many other occasions in the half-playful, half-decisive, "I hate 'em," as if to throw up the final barrier of her own perversity before pursuit. Not that she hadn't been decent enough in her actual treatment, it was rather that she would never take the Pottses, or any of the others--oddities she evidently considered them-seriously; it was, most of all, that she would never let them come near enough to try to take her seriously. She held herself aloof, not disdainful, but indifferently gay, from her father's instruments, her father's friends, her father's aims.

Later on, as Imogen grew into girlhood, her mother lost most of the gaiety and all of the levity. Imogen guessed that storms, more violent than any she was allowed to witness, intervened between young rebellion and the cautious peace, the hostility that no longer laughed and no longer lost its temper, but that, quiet, kind, observant, went its own way, leaving her father to go his. The last memory that came up for her was of what had followed such a storm. It seemed to mark an epoch, to close the chapter of struggle and initiate that of acceptance. What the contest had been she never knew, but she remembered in every detail its sequel, remembered lying in bed in her placid, fire-lit room and hearing in her mother's room next hers the sound of violent sobbing.

Imogen had felt, while she listened, a vague, alarmed pity, a pity mingled with condemnation. Her father never lost his self-control and had taught her that to do so was selfish; so that, as she listened to the undisciplined grief, and thought that it might be well for her to go in to her mother and console her, she thought, too, of the line that, tenderly, she would say to her--for Imogen, now, was fourteen years old, with an excellent taste in poetry:

"The G.o.ds approve The depth, but not the tumult, of the soul."

It was a line her father often quoted to her and she always thought of him when she thought of it.

But, just as she was rising to go on this errand of mercy, her father himself had come in. He sat down in silence by her bed and put out his hand to hers and then she seemed to understand all from the very contrast that his silence made. The sobs they listened to were those of a pa.s.sionate, a punished child, of a child, too, who could use unchildlike weapons, could cut, could pierce; she must not leave her father to go to it. After a little while the sobs were still and, as her father, without speaking, sat on, stroking her hair and hand, the door softly opened and her mother came in. Imogen could see her, in her long white dressing-gown, with her wide braids falling on either side, all the traces of weeping carefully effaced.

She often came in so to kiss Imogen good-night, gently, and with a slight touch of shyness, as though she knew herself shut away from the inner chamber of the child's heart, and the moment was their tenderest, for Imogen, understanding, though powerless to respond, never felt so sorry or so fond as then. But to-night her mother, seeing them there together hand in hand, seeing that they must have listened to her own intemperate grief,--their eyes gravely, unitedly judging her told her that,--seeing that her husband, as at the very beginning, had found at once his ally, drew back quickly and went away without a word. Whatever the cause of contest, Imogen knew that in this silent confrontation of each other in her presence was the final severance. After that her mother had acquiesced.

She acquiesced, but she yielded nothing, confessed nothing. One couldn't tell whether she, too, judged, but one suspected it, and the dim sense of an alien standard placed over against them more and more closely drew Imogen and her father together for mutual sustainment. If, however, her mother judged, she never expressed judgment; and if she felt the need of sustainment, she never claimed it. It would, indeed, have been rather fruitless to claim it from the fourth member of the family group. Eddy seemed so little to belong to the group. As far as he went, to be sure, he went always with her and against his father, but then Eddy never went far enough to form any sort of a bulwark. A cheerful, smiling, hard young pagan, Eddy, frankly bored by his father, coolly fond of his mother, avoiding the one, but capable of little effective demonstration toward the other. Eddy liked achievement, exact.i.tude, a serene, smiling outlook, and was happily absorbed in his own interests.

So it had all gone on,--Imogen traced it, sitting there in her quiet corner, holding balances in fair, firm hands,--her mother drifting into a place of mere conventionality in the family life; and Imogen, even now, could not see quite clearly whether it had been she who had judged and abandoned her husband, or he who had judged and put her aside. In either case she could sum it up, her eyes lifted once more to the portrait's steady eyes, with, "Poor, wonderful papa."

He was gone, the dear, the wonderful one, and she was left single-handed to carry on his work. What this work was loomed largely, though vaguely, for her. The three slender volumes, literary and ethical, were the only permanent testament that her father had given to the world; and dealing, as in the main they did, with ultimate problems, their keynote an illumined democracy that saw in most of the results as yet achieved by his country a base travesty of the doctrine, the largeness of their grasp was perhaps a trifle loose. Imogen did not see it. Her appreciation was more of aims than of achievements; but she felt that her father's writings were the body, only, of his message; its spirit lived--lived in herself and in all those with whom he had come in fruitful--contact. It was to hand on the meaning of that spirit that she felt herself dedicated. Perfect, unflinching truth; the unfaltering bearing witness to all men of his conception of right; the seeing of her own personality as but an instrument in the service of good--these were the chief words of the gospel. Life in its realest sense meant only this dedication. To serve, to love, to be the truth. Her eyes on her father's pictured eyes, Imogen smiled into them, promising him and herself that she would not fail.

VII