A Fountain Sealed. Anne Douglas Sedgwick
mean in the way we feared?—that she'll try to change things?"
"She'll not seem to try. She'll seem to accept. But she's against my country; against my life; against me."
"Well, if she accepts, or seems to, that will make it easy for you. There will be nothing to fight, to oppose."
"Don't use her word, Jack. She will make it easy on the surface; but it's that that will be so hard for me to bear; the surface ease over the hidden discord."
"You may resolve the discord. Give her time to grow her roots. How can you expect anything but effort now, in this soil that she can't but associate with mistakes and sorrows?"
"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 assured 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 amusement.
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 ondulée, parfumée, 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, passed 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 butterfly. 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 attitude 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 butterfly." 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 attitude, 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 passed 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,