Valerie has seen her so much!" Mrs. Pakenham cried, a little shocked at the other's ruthlessness. "Three months of every year—almost."
"Three months when they played hostess to each other. It was really Valerie who was the guest in the house when Imogen and her father were there. The relation was never normal. Now that poor Everard is gone, the necessary artificiality can cease. Valerie can try her hand at being a mother, not a guest. It will do both her and Imogen good."
"That's just the conclusion I had come to. That's just how I had been seeing it." The fresh tea-pot was brought in at this juncture, and, as she spoke, Valerie roused herself to measure in the tea and pour on the boiling water. She showed them, thus, more fully, the grace, the freshness, the look of latent buoyancy that made her so young, that made her, even now, in her black dress and with her gravity, remind one of a flower, submerged, momentarily, in deep water, its color hardly blurred, its petals delicately crisp, its fragrance only needing air and sunlight to diffuse itself. For all the youthfulness, a quality of indolent magic was about her, a soft haze, as it were, woven of matured experience, of detachment from youth's self-absorption, of the observer's kindly, yet ironic, insight. Her figure was supple; her nut-brown hair, splendidly folded at the back of her head, was hardly touched with white; her quickly glancing, deliberately pausing, eyes were as clear, as pensive, as a child's; with almost a child's candor of surprise in the upturning of their lashes. A brunette duskiness in the rose of lips and cheeks, in the black brows, in the fruit-like softness of outline, was like a veil drawn across and dimming the fairness that paled to a pearly white at throat and temples. Her upper lip was ever so faintly shadowed with a brunette penciling of down, and three grains de beauté, like tiny patches of velvet, seemed applied with a pretty coquetry, one on her lip and two high on her cheek, where they emphasized and lent a touch of the Japanese to her smile. Even her physical aspect carried out the analogy of something vivid and veiled. She was clear as day, yet melting, merged, elusive, like the night; and in her glance, in her voice, was that mingled brightness and shadow. When she had given them their tea she left her friends, taking her toasted little dog, languid and yawning, under her arm, and, at a sharp yelp from this petted individual, his paw struck by the opening of the door, they heard her exclaiming in contrition over him, "Darling lamb! did his wicked mother hurt him!"
Mrs. Pakenham and Mrs. Wake sipped their tea for some time in silence, and it was Mrs. Pakenham who voiced at last the thought uppermost for both of them, "I wonder how Sir Basil will take it."
"Everard's death, you mean, or her going off?"
"Both."
"It's obvious, I think, that if he doesn't follow her at once it will only be because he thinks that now his chance has come he will make it surer by waiting."
"It's rather odious of me to think about it at all, I suppose," Mrs. Pakenham mused, "but one can't help it, having seen it all; having seen more than either of them have, I'm quite sure, poor, lovely dears."
"No, one certainly can't help it," Mrs. Wake acquiesced. "Though I, perhaps, should have been too prudish to own to it just now—with poor Everard hardly in his grave. But that's the comfort of being with a frank, unscrupulous person like you; one gets it all out and need take no responsibility."
Mrs. Pakenham smiled over her friend's self-exposure and helped her to greater comfort with a still more crude, "It will be perfect, you know, if he does succeed. I suppose there's no doubt that he will."
"I don't know; I really don't know," Mrs. Wake mused.
"One knows well enough that she's tremendously fond of him—it's just that that she has taken her stand on so beautifully, so gracefully."
"Yes, so beautifully and so gracefully that while one does know that, one can't know more—he least of all. He, I'm pretty sure, knows not a scrap more,"
"But, after all, now that she's free, that is enough."
"Yes—except—".
"Really, my dear, I see no exception. He is a delightful creature, as sound, as strong, as true; and if he isn't very clever, Valerie is far too clever herself to mind that, far too clever not to care for how much more than clever he is."
"Oh, it's not that she doesn't care—"
"What is it, then, you carping, skeptical creature? It's all perfect. An uncongenial, tiresome husband—and she need have no self-reproach about him, either—finally out of the way; a reverential adorer at hand; youth still theirs; money; a delightful place—what more could one ask?"
"Ah," Mrs. Wake sighed a little, "I don't know. It's not, perhaps, that one would ask more, but less. It's too pretty, too easy, too à propos; so much so that it frightens me a little. Valerie has, you see, made a mess of it. She has, you see, spoiled her life, in that aspect of it. To mend it now, so completely, to start fresh at—how old is she?—at forty-six, it's just a little glib. Somehow one doesn't get off so easily as that. One can't start so happily at forty-six. Perhaps one is wiser not to try."
"Oh, nonsense, my dear! It's very American, that, you know, that picking of holes in excellent material, furbishing up your consciences, running after your motives as if you were ferrets in a rat-hole. If all you have to say against it is that it's too perfect, too happy—why, then I keep to my own conviction. She'll be peacefully married and back among us in a year."
Mrs. Wake seemed to acquiesce, yet still to have her reserves. "There's
Imogen, you know. Imogen has to be counted with."
"Counted with! Valerie, I hope, is clever enough to manage that young person. It would be a little too much if the daughter spoiled the end of her life as the husband spoiled the beginning."
"You are a bit hard on Everard, you know, from mere partizanship. Valerie was by no means a misused wife and his friends may well have thought him a misused husband; Imogen does, I'm sure. She has, perhaps, a right to feel that, as her father's representative, her mother owes her something in the way of atonement."
"It does vex me, my dear, to have you argue like that against your own convictions. It was all his fault—one only has to know her to be sure of it. He made things unbearable for her."
"It was hardly his fault. He couldn't help being unbearable."
"Well—certainly she couldn't help it!" cried Mrs. Pakenham, laughing as if this settled it. She rose, putting her hands on the mantelpiece and warming her foot preparatory to her departure; and, summing up her cheerful convictions, she added: "I'm sorry for the poor man, of course; but, after all, he seems to have done very much what he liked with his life. And I can't help being very glad that he didn't succeed in quite spoiling hers. Good luck to Sir Basil is what I say."
III
Mrs. Upton was in the drawing-room next morning when Sir Basil Thremdon was announced. She had not seen this old friend and neighbor since the news of her bereavement had reached her, and now, rising to meet him, a consciousness of all that had changed for her, a consciousness, perhaps more keen, of all that had changed for him, showed in a deepening of her color.
Sir Basil was a tall, spare, stalwart man of fifty, the limpid innocence of his blue eyes contrasting with his lean, aquiline countenance. His hair and mustache were bleached by years to a light fawn-color and his skin tanned by a hardy life to a deep russet;
