A Fountain Sealed.
by Anne Douglas Sedgwick.
I
Three people were sitting in a small drawing-room, the windows of which looked out upon a wintry Boston street. It was a room rather empty and undecorated, but the idea of austerity was banished by a temperature so nearly tropical. There were rows of books on white shelves, a pale Donatello cast on the wall, and two fine bronze vases filled with roses on the mantelpiece. Over the roses hung a portrait in oils, very sleek and very accurate, of a commanding old gentleman in uniform, painted by a well-known German painter, and all about the room were photographs of young women, most of them young mothers, with smooth heads and earnest faces, holding babies. Outside, the snow was heaped high along the pavements and thickly ridged the roofs and lintels. After the blizzard the sun was shining and all the white glittered. The national colors, to a patriotic imagination, were pleasingly represented by the red, white and blue of the brick houses, the snow, and the vivid sky above.
The three people who talked, with many intimate pauses of silence, were all Bostonians, though of widely different types. The hostess, sitting in an easy chair and engaged with some sewing, was a girl of about twenty-six.
She wore a brown skirt of an ugly cut and shade and a white silk shirt, adorned with a high linen collar, a brown tie and an old-fashioned gold watch-chain. Her forehead was too large, her nose too short; but her lips were full and pleasant and when she smiled she showed charming teeth. The black-rimmed gla.s.ses she wore emphasized the clearness and candor of her eyes. Her thick, fair hair was firmly fastened in a group of k.n.o.bs down the back of her head. There was an element of the grotesque in her appearance and in her careful, clumsy movements, yet, with it, a quality almost graceful, that suggested homely and wholesome a.n.a.logies,--freshly-baked bread; fair, sweet linen; the safety and content of evening firesides. This was Mary Colton.
The girl who sat near the window, her furs thrown back from her shoulders, a huge m.u.f.f dangling from her hand, was a few years younger and exceedingly pretty. Her skin was unusually white, her hair unusually black, her velvety eyes unusually large and dark. In. her att.i.tude, lounging, graceful, indifferent, in her delicate face, the straight, sulky brows, the coldly closed lips, the coldly observant eyes, a sort of permanent discontent was expressed, as though she could find, neither in herself nor in the world, any adequate satisfaction. This was Rose Packer.
The other guest, sitting sidewise on a stiff chair, his hand hanging over the back, his long legs crossed, was a young man, graceful, lean and shabby. He was clean-shaven, with brown skin and golden hair, an unruly lock lying athwart his forehead. His face, intent, alert, was veiled in an indolent nonchalance. He looked earnest, yet capricious, staunch, yet sensitive, and one felt that, conscious of these weaknesses, he tried to master or to hide them.
These three had known one another since childhood. Jack"s family was old and rich; Mary"s old and poor; Rose Packer"s new and of fantastic wealth.
Rose was a young woman of fashion and her whole aspect seemed to repudiate any closeness of tie between herself and Mary, who pa.s.sed her time in caring for General Colton, her invalid father, attending committees, and, as a diversion, going to "sewing-circles" and symphony concerts; but she was fonder of Mary than of any one else in the world. Rose, who had, as it were, been brought up all over the world, divided her time now between two continents and quaintly diversified her dancing, hunting, yachting existence by the arduous study of biology. Jack, in appearance more ambiguous than either, looked neither useful nor ornamental; but, in point of fact, he was a much occupied person. He painted very seriously, was something of a scholar and devoted much of his time and most of his large fortune to intricate benevolences. His shabby clothes were a.s.sumed, like the air of indolence; his wealth irked him and, full of a democratic transcendentalism, he longed to efface all the signs that separated him from the average toiler. While Rose was quite ignorant of her own country west of the Atlantic seaboard, Jack had wandered North, South, West. As for Mary, she had hardly left Boston in her life, except to go to the Ma.s.sachusetts coast in summer and to pay a rare visit now and then to New York. It was of such a visit that she had been talking to them and of the friend who, since her own return home only a few days before, had suffered a sudden bereavement in the death of her father. Jack Pennington, also a near friend of Imogen Upton"s, had just come from New York, where he had been with her during the mournful ceremonies of death, and Mary Colton, after a little pause, had said, "I suppose she was very wonderful through it all."
"She bore up very well," said Jack Pennington. "There would never be anything selfish in her grief."
"Never. And when one thinks what a grief it is. She is wonderful," said Mary.
"You think every one wonderful, Molly," Rose Packer remarked, not at all aggressively, but with her air of quiet ill-temper.
"Mary"s enthusiasm has. .h.i.t the mark this time," said Pennington, casting a glance more scrutinizing than severe upon the girl.
"I really can"t see it. Of course Imogen Upton is pretty--remarkably pretty--though I"ve always thought her nose too small; and she is certainly clever; but why should she be called wonderful?"
"I think it is her goodness, Rose," said Mary, with an air of gentle willingness to explain. "It"s her radiant goodness. I know that Imogen has mastered philosophies, literatures, sciences--in so far as a young and very busy girl can master them, and that very wise men are glad to talk to her; but it"s not of that one thinks--nor of her great beauty, either. Both seem taken up, absorbed in that selflessness, that loving-kindness, that"s like a higher kind of cleverness--almost like a genius."
"She"s not nearly so good as you are, Molly. And after all, what does she do, anyway?"
Mary kept her look of leniency, as if over the half-playful naughtinesses of a child. "She organizes and supports all sorts of charities, all sorts of reforms; she is the wisest, sweetest of hostesses; she takes care of her brother; she took care of her father;--she takes care of anybody who is in need or unhappy."
"Was Mr. Upton so unhappy? He certainly looked gloomy;--I hardly knew him; Eddy, however, I do know, very well; he isn"t in the least unhappy. He doesn"t need help."
"I think we all need help, dear. As for Mr. Upton,--you know," Mary spoke very gravely now, "you know about Mrs. Upton."
"Of course I do, and what"s better, I know her herself a little. _Elle est charmeuse_."
"I have never seen her," said Mary, "but I don"t understand how you can call a frivolous and heartless woman, who practically deserted her husband and children, _charmeuse_;--but perhaps that is all that one can call her."
"I like frivolous people," said Rose, "and most women would have deserted Mr. Upton, if what I"ve heard of him was true."
"What have you heard of him?"
"That he was a bombastic prig."
At this Mary"s pale cheek colored. "Try to remember, Rose, that he died only a week ago."
"Oh, he may be different now, of course."
"I can"t bear to hear you speak so, Rose. I did know him. I saw a great deal of him during this last year. He was a very big person indeed."
"Of course I"m a pig to talk like this, if you really liked him, Molly."
But Mary was not to be turned aside by such ambiguous apology. "You see, you don"t know, Rose. The pleasure-seeking, worldly people among whom you live could hardly understand a man like Mr. Upton. Simply what he did for civic reform,--worked himself to death over it. And his books on ethics, politics. It isn"t a question of my liking him. I don"t know that I ever thought of my feeling for him in those terms. It was reverence, rather, and grat.i.tude for his being what he was."
"Well, dear, I do remember hearing men, and not worldly men, as you call them, either, say that his work for civic reform amounted to very little and that his books were thin and unoriginal. As for that community place he founded at, where was it?--Clackville? He meddled that out of life."
"He may have been Utopian, he may have been in some ways ineffectual; but he was a good man, a wonderful, yes, Rose, a wonderful man,"
"And do you think that Molly has. .h.i.t the mark in this, too?" Rose asked, turning her eyes on Pennington. He had been listening with an air of light inattention and now he answered tersely, as if conquering some inner reluctance by over-emphasis, "Couldn"t abide him."
Rose laughed out, though with some surprise in her triumph; and Mary, redder than before, rejoined in a low voice, "I didn"t expect you, Jack, to let personal tastes interfere with fair judgment."
"Oh, I"m not judging him," said Jack.
"But do you feel with me," said Rose, "that it"s no wonder that Mrs. Upton left him."
"Not in the least," Pennington replied, glad, evidently, to make clear his disagreement. "I don"t know of any reason that Mrs. Upton had for deserting not only her husband but her children."
"But have they been left? Isn"t it merely that they prefer to stay?"
"Prefer to live in their own country? among their own people? Certainly."
"But she spends part of every year with them. There was never any open breach."
"Everybody knew that she would not live with her husband and everybody knew why," Mary said. "It has nearly broken Imogen"s heart. She left him because he wouldn"t lead the kind of life she wanted to lead--the kind of life she leads in England--one of mere pleasure and self-indulgent ease. She hasn"t the faintest conception of duty or of patriotism. She couldn"t help her husband in any way, and she wouldn"t let him help her. All she cares for is fashion, admiration and pretty clothes."
"Stuff and nonsense, my dear! She doesn"t think one bit more about her clothes than Imogen does. It requires more thought to look like a saint in velvet than to go to the best dressmaker and order a trousseau. I wonder how long it took Imogen to find out that way of doing her hair."
"Rose!--I must beg of you--I love her."
"But I"m saying nothing against her!"
"When I think of what she is suffering now, what you say sounds cruelly irreverent. Jack, I know, feels as I do."
"Yes, he does," said the young man. He got up now and stood, very tall, in the middle of the room looking down at Mary. "I must be off. I"ll bring you those books to-morrow afternoon--though I don"t see much good in your reading d"Annunzio."
"Why, if you do, Jack?" said Mary, with some wonder. And the degree of intimate equality in the relations of these young people may be gaged by the fact that he appeared to receive her rejoinder as conclusive.
"Well, he"s interesting, of course, and if one wants to understand modern decadence in an all-round way--"
"I want to understand everything," said Mary. "And please bring your best Italian dictionary with them."
"Before you go, Jack," said Rose, "pray shut the register. It"s quite stifling in here."
"Far too hot," said Jack, showing his impartiality of spirit by his seconding of Rose"s complaint, for it was evident she had much displeased him. "I"ve often told you, Mary, how bad it was for you. That"s why you are so pale."