The sky was like a deep rose, soft, dim, dying, and the color of the afterglow filled the room.
Standing at the window she breathed in the keen, sweet air, and looked from the dying day down to her garden.
She had watched Jack disappear among the trees, waving to him, and her heart followed his aching heart with comprehending pity. But, from her conquest of the thrill, a clear, contemplative insight was left with her, so that, looking out over the lives she was to watch, she felt herself, for all her sadness, a merry, if a serious fate, mingling the threads of others" fortunes with a benignant hand.
Imogen"s threads had snapped off very sharply. Imogen would be the better pleased that the Surrey cottage should know her no more. The pang for the wrecking of all maternal hope pa.s.sed strangely into a deeper pang for all that the Surrey cottage stood for in her life, all the things that she had left to come to Imogen. She remembered. And, for a moment, the old vortex of whirling anguish almost engulfed her. Only long years could deaden the pang of that parting. She would not dwell on that. Eddy and Rose; to turn to them was to feel almost gay. Jack and Mary;--yes, on these last names her thoughts lingered and her gaze for them held tender presages. That must be.
Jack would not know how her maternal solicitude was to encompa.s.s him and mold his way. If the benignant fate saw clearly, Jack and Mary were to marry. Strange that it should not be from anything of her own that the deepest call upon her fostering tenderness came. She wasn"t needed by anything of her own. This was the tragedy of her life that, more than youth pa.s.sed and love renounced, seemed to drift snows upon her.
But, beyond the personal pang and failure, she could look down at her garden and out at the quiet, evening vistas. The very flowers seemed to smile gentle promises to her, and to murmur that, after all, rather than bitterness, failure was to bring humble peace.
Leaning her head against the window, where in the breeze the curtain softly flapped, she looked out at the tranquil twilight, contented to be sad.
"I will have friends with me," she said to herself; "I will garden and learn a new language. I will read a great many books." And, with a sense of happy daring, not rebuked by reason, she could add, thinking of the mingled threads:--"I will have them often here to stay with me, and, perhaps, they will let me spoil the babies."