"Imogen," said her mother, raising her eyes with a look of command; "you forget yourself. Be still."
Imogen"s face froze to stone. Such words, such a look, she had never met before. She stood silent, helpless, rage and despair at her heart.
But Mr. Potts did not lag behind his duty. His hand still wrapped, Moses-like, in his beard, his eyes bent in holy wrath upon his hostess, he rose to his feet, and Mrs. Potts, in recounting the scene--one of the most thrilling of her life--always said that never had she seen Delancy so superbly _true_, never had she seen blood so _tell_.
"I must say to you, Mrs. Upton, with the deepest pain," he said, "that I agree with Miss Imogen. I must inform you, Mrs. Upton, that you have no right, legal or moral, to bind us by your own shortcoming. Miss Imogen and I may do our duty without your help or consent."
"I have nothing more to say to you, Mr. Potts," Valerie replied. She had, unseeingly, taken up her pen again and, with a gesture habitual to her, was drawing squares and crosses on the blotter under her hand. The lines trembled. The angles of the squares would not meet.
"But I have still something to say to you, Mrs. Upton," said Mr. Potts; "I have still to say to you that, much as you have shocked and pained us in the past, you have never so shocked and pained us as now. We had hoped for better things in you,--wider lights, deeper insights, the unsealing of your eyes to error and wrong in yourself; we had hoped that sorrow would work its sacred discipline and that, with your daughter"s hand to guide you, you were preparing to follow, from however far a distance, in the footsteps of him who is gone. This must count for us, always, as a dark day of life, when we have seen a human soul turn wilfully from the good held out to it and choose deliberately the evil. I speak for myself and for Mrs.
Potts--and in sorrow rather than in wrath, Mrs. Upton. I say nothing of your daughter; I bow my head before that sacred filial grief. I--"
But here, suddenly, quiet, swift, irresistible as a flame, Jack rose from his place. It seemed one suave, unbroken motion, that by which he laid a hand on Mr. Potts"s shoulder, a hand on Mrs. Potts"s shoulder--she had risen in wonder and alarm at the menacing descent upon her lord--laid a hand on each, swept them to the door, opened it, swept them out, and shut the door upon them. Then he turned and leaned upon it, his arms folded.
"Perhaps, Jack, you wish to put me out, too," said Imogen in a voice of ice and fire. "Your arguments are conclusive. I hope that mama approves her champion."
Valerie now seemed to lean heavily on the table; she rested her forehead on her hand, covering her eyes.
"Have you anything to say to me, mama, before Jack executes his justice on me?" Imogen asked.
"Spare me, Imogen," her mother answered.
"Have you spared _me_?" said Imogen. "Have you spared my father? What right have you to ask for mercy? You are a cruel, a shallow, a selfish woman, and you break my heart as you broke his. Now Jack, you need not put me out. I will go of myself."
When Jack had closed the door on her, he still stood leaning against it at a distance from Valerie. He saw that she wept, bitterly and uncontrollably; but, at first, awed by her grief, he did not dare approach her. It was only when the sobs were quieted that he went and stood near her.
"You were right, right," he almost whispered.
She did not answer, and wept on as if there could be no consolation for her in such rightness.
"It had to come," said Jack; "she had to be made to understand. And--you are right."
She was not thinking of herself. "Oh, Jack Jack," she spoke at last, putting out her hand to his and grasping it tightly "How I have hurt her.
Poor Imogen;--my poor, poor child."
XX
Imogen hardly knew where she went, or how, when she left her mother--her mother and Jack--and darted from the house on the wings of a supreme indignation, a supreme despair. Her sense of fitness was not that of Mr.
Potts, and she knew that her father"s biography was doomed. Against her mother"s wish it could not, with any grace, any dignity, be published. Mr.
Potts would put forth appreciation of his departed chief in the small, grandiloquent review to which he contributed--he had only delayed because of the greater project--but such a tribute would be a sealing of public failure rather than the kindling of public recognition. Already her father, by that larger public, was forgotten--forgotten; Mr. Potts would not make him remembered.
The word "forgotten" seemed like the beat of dark, tragic wings, bearing her on and on. The fire of a bitter wrong burned in her. And it was not the sense of personal wrong--though that was fierce,--that made her flight so blind and headlong--not her mother"s cruelty nor Jack"s sinister espousal of the cause he saw as evil; it was this final, this culminating wrong to her father. His face rose before her, while she fled, the deep, dark eyes dwelling with persistence on her as though they asked,--she seemed to hear the very words and in his very voice:--"What have they done to me, little daughter? Did I deserve this heaping of dust upon my name;--and from her hands?"
For it was that. Dust, the dust of indifferent time, of cold-hearted oblivion, was drifting over him, hiding his smile, his eyes, his tears.
It seemed to mount, to suffocate her, as she ran, this dust, strewn by her mother"s hand. Even in her own heart she had known the parching of its drifting fall, known that crouching doubts--not of him, never of him--but of his greatness, had lurked in ambush since her mother had come home;--known that the Pottses and their fitness had never before been so clearly seen for the little that they were since her mother--and all that her mother had brought--had come into her life. And, before this drifting of dust upon her faith in her father"s greatness, her heart, all that was deepest in it, broke into a greater trust, a greater love, sobs beneath it.
He was not great, perhaps, as the world counted greatness; but he was good, good,--he was sorrowful and patient. He loved her as no one had ever loved her. His ideals were hers and her love was his. Dust might lie on his tomb; but never, never, in her heart.
"Ah, it"s cruel! cruel! cruel!" she panted, as she ran, ran, up the rocky, woodland path, leaping from ledge to ledge, slipping on the silky moss, falling now and then on hands and knees, but not pausing or faltering until she reached the murmuring pine-woods, the gra.s.sy, aromatic glades where the mountain-laurel grew.
Pallid, disheveled, with tragic, unseeing eyes and parted lips--the hollowed eyes, the sorrowful lips of a cla.s.sic mask--she rushed from the shadows of the mountain--path into this place of sunlight and solitude. A doomed, distraught Antigone.
And so she looked to Sir Basil, who, his back against a warm rock, a cigarette in one lazy hand, was outstretched there before her on the moss, a bush of flowering laurel at his head, and, at his feet, beyond tree-tops, the steep, far blue of the lower world. He was gazing placidly at this view, empty of thought and even of conscious appreciation, wrapped in a balmy contentment, when, with the long, deep breath of a hunted deer, Imogen leaped from darkness into light, and her face announced such disaster that, casting aside the cigarette, springing to his feet, he seized her by the arms, thinking that she might fall before him. And indeed she would have cast herself face downward on the gra.s.s had he not been there; and she leaned forward on his supporting hands, speechless, breathing heavily, borne down by the impetus of her headlong run. Then, her face hidden from him as she leaned, she burst into sobs.
"Miss Upton!--Imogen!--My dear child!--" said Sir Basil, in a crescendo of distress and solicitude.
She leaned there on his hands weeping so bitterly and so helplessly that he finished his phrase by putting an arm around her, and so more effectually supporting her, so satisfying, also, his own desire to comfort and caress her.
The human touch, the human tenderness--though him she hardly realized--drew her grief to articulateness. "Oh--my father!--my father!--Oh--what have they done to you!" she gasped, leaning her forehead against Sir Basil"s shoulder.
"Your father?" Sir Basil repeated soothingly, since this departed personality seemed a menace that might easily be dealt with, "What is it?
What have they done? How can I help you? My dear child, do treat me as a friend. Do tell me what is the matter."
"It"s mama! mama!--she has broken my heart--as she broke his," sobbed Imogen, finding her former words. Already, such was the amazing irony of events, Sir Basil seemed, more than anyone in the world, to take that dead father"s place, to help her in her grief over him. The puzzle of it inflicted a deeper pang. "I can"t tell you," she sobbed. "But I can never, never forgive her!"
"Forgive your mother?" Sir Basil repeated, shocked. "Don"t, I beg of you, speak so. It"s some misunderstanding."
"No!--No!--It is understanding--it is the whole understanding! It has come out at last--the truth--the dreadful truth."
"But can"t you tell me? can"t you explain?"
She lifted her face and drew away from him as she said, pressing her handkerchief to her eyes: "You never knew him. You cannot care for him--no one who cares, as much as you do, for her,--can ever care for him."
Sir Basil had deeply flushed. He led her to the sunny rock and made her sit down on a low ledge, where she leaned forward, her face in her hands, long sighs of exhaustion succeeding her tears. "I know nothing about your father, as you say, and I do care, very much, for your mother," said Sir Basil after a little while. "But I care for you, very much, too."
"Ah, but you could never care for me so much as to think her wrong."
"I don"t know about that. Why not?--if she is wrong. One often thinks people one is fond of very wrong. Do you know," and Sir Basil now sat down beside her, a little lower, on the moss, "do you know you"ll make me quite wretched if you won"t have confidence in me. I really can"t stand seeing you suffer and not know what it"s about. I don"t--I can"t feel myself such a stranger as that. Won"t you think of me," he took one of her hands and held it as he said this, "won"t you think of me as, well, as a sort of affectionate old brother, you know? I want to be trusted, and to see if I can"t help you. Don"t be afraid," he added, "of being disloyal--of making me care less, you know, for your mother, by anything you say; for you wouldn"t."
Leaning there, her face hidden, while she half heard him, it struck her suddenly, a shaft of light in darkness, that, indeed, he might help her.
She dropped her hand to look at him and, with all its tear-stained disfigurement, he thought that he had never seen anything more heavenly than that look. It sought, it sounded him, pleaded with and caressed him.
And, with all its solemnity, there dawned in it a tenderness deeper than any that he had ever seen in her.
"I do trust you," she said. "I think of you as a near, a dear friend. And, since you promise me that it will change you in nothing, I will tell you. I believe that perhaps you can help us,--my father and me. You must count me with him, you know, always. We want to write a life of him, Mr. Potts and I. Mr. Potts--you may have seen it--is an ordinary person, ordinary but for one thing, one great and beautiful thing that papa and I always felt in him,--and that beautiful thing is his depth of unselfish devotion to great causes and to good people. He worked for my father like a faithful, loving dog. He had an accurate knowledge of all the activities that papa"s life was given to--all the ideals it aimed at and attained--yes, yes, attained,--whatever they may say. He has a very skilful pen, and is in touch with the public press. So, though I would, of course, have wished for a more adequate biographer, I was glad and proud to accept his offer; and I would have overlooked, revised, everything. We felt,--and by we, I mean not only Mr. and Mrs. Potts, but all his many, many friends, all those whose lives he loved and helped and lifted--that we owed it to the world he served not to let his name fade from among us. You cannot dream, Sir Basil, of what sort of man my father was. His life was one long devotion to the highest things, one long service of the weak and oppressed, one long battle with the wrong. Those who are incapable of following him to the heights can give you no true picture of him. I will say nothing, in this respect, of mama, except that she could not follow him,--and that she made him very, very unhappy, and with him, me. For I shared all his griefs. She left us; she laughed at all the things we cared and worked for. My father never spoke bitterly of her; his last words, almost, were for her, words of tenderness and pity and forgiveness. He had the capacity that only great souls have, of love for littler natures. I say this much so that you may know that any idea that you may have gathered of my father is, perforce, a garbled, a false one. He was a n.o.ble, a wonderful man. Everything I am I owe to him."
Imogen had straightened herself, the traces of weeping almost gone, her own fluency, as was usual with her, quieting her emotion, even while her own and her father"s wrongs, thus objectivized in careful phrases, made indignation at once colder and deeper. Her very effort to quell indignation, to command her voice to an even justice of tone before this lover of her mother"s, gave it a resonant quality, curiously impressive.
And, as she looked before her, down into the blue profundities, the sense of her own sincerity seemed to pulse back to her from her silent listener, and filled her with a growing consciousness of power over him.
"This morning," she took up her theme on that resonant note, deepened to a tragic pitch, "we went to mama--Mr. Potts and I--to tell her of our project of commemoration, to ask her cooperation. We wanted to be very generous with her, to take her help and her sympathy for granted. I should have felt it an insult to my mother had I told Mr. Potts that we must carry on our work without consulting her. She received us with cold indifference.
She tried not to listen, when she heard what our errand was. And her indifference became hostility, when she understood. All her old hatred for what he was and meant, all her fundamental antagonism to the purpose of his life--and to him--came at last, openly, to the light. She was forced to reveal herself. Not only has she no love, no reverence for him, but she cannot bear that others should learn to love him and to reverence him.
She sneered at his claim to distinction; she refused her consent to our project. It is a terrible thing for me to say--but I must--and you will understand me--you who will not care less for her because she is so wrong--what I feel most of all in her att.i.tude is a childish, yet a cruel, jealousy. She cannot endure that she should be so put into the dark by the spreading of his light. The greater his radiance is shown to be, the more in the wrong will all her life be proved;--it is that that she will not hear of. She _wants_ him to be obscure, undistinguished, negligible, because it"s that that she has always thought him."
Sir Basil, while she spoke, had kept his eyes fixed on the hand he held, a beautiful hand, white, curiously narrow, with pointed, upturned finger-tips. Once or twice a dull color rose to his sunburned cheek, but in his well-balanced mind was a steady perception of what the filial grief and pain must be from which certain words came. He could not resent them; it was inevitable that a child who had so loved her father should so think and feel. And her self-control, her accurate fluency, answered with him for her sincerity as emotion could not have done. Pa.s.sion would never carry this n.o.ble girl into overstatement. Fairness constrained him to admit, while he listened, that dark color in his cheek, that her view of her father was more likely to be right than her mother"s view. An unhappily married woman was seldom fair. Mrs. Upton had never mentioned her husband to him, never alluded to him except in most formal terms; but the facts of her flight from the marital hearth, the fact that he had made her so unhappy, had been to him sufficient evidence of Mr. Upton"s general unworthiness. Now, though Imogen"s tragic ardor did not communicate any of her faith in her father"s wonder or n.o.bility, it did convince him of past unfairness toward, no doubt, a most worthy man. Incompatibility, that had been the trouble; he one of these reformer people, very much in earnest; and Mrs. Upton, dear and lovely though she was, with not a trace of such enthusiasm in her moral make-up.
So, when Imogen had finished, though he sat silent for a little while, though beneath the steady survey of what she put before him was a stirring of trouble, it was in a tone of quiet acceptance that he at last said, looking up at her, "Yes; I quite see what you feel about it. To you, of course, they must look like that, your mother"s reasons. They must look very differently to her, that goes without saying. We can"t really make out these things, you know, these fundamental antagonisms; I never knew it went as far as that. But I quite see. Poor child. I"m very sorry. It is most awfully hard on you."