They strolled in the sunlight under arbors rippling all over with the exquisite purple, dark and pale, the thin fine leaves of a strange olive-green, the delicate tendrils; they passed into open spaces where, on gray rocks, it streamed like the tresses of a cascade; it climbed and heaped itself on wayside trellises and ran nimbly, in a shower of fragile color, up the trunks, along the branches, of the trees. Jack always afterward associated the soft, falling purple, the soft, languorous fragrance, the almost uncanny beauty of the wistaria, with melancholy and presage.
Imogen, for the first time since her father's death, showed a concession to the year's revival in a transparent band of white at her neck and wrists. Her little hat, too, was of transparent black, its crape put aside. But, though she and the day shared in bloom and youthfulness, Jack had never seen her look more heavily bodeful; had never seen her eyes more fixed, her lips more cold and stern. The excitement that he had felt in her was gone. Her curiosity, her watchfulness, had been satisfied, and grimly rewarded. She faced sinister facts. Jack felt himself ready to face them, too.
They had spoken little in the clattering car, and for a long time after they reached the park and walked hither and thither among its paths, following at random the beckoning purple of the wistaria, neither spoke of anything but commonplaces; indicating points of view, or assenting to appreciations. But Imogen said at last, and he knew that with the words she led him up to those facts: "Do you remember, Jack, the day we met mama, you and I, on the docks?"
Jack replied that he did.
"What a different day from this," said Imogen, "with its frosty glory, its challenge, its strength."
"Very different."
"And how different our lives are," said Imogen.
He did not reply for some moments, and it was then to say gently that he hoped they were not so different as, perhaps, they seemed.
"It is not I who have changed, Jack," said Imogen, looking before her. And going on, as though she wished to hear no reply to this: "Do you remember how we felt as the steamer came in? We determined that she should change nothing, that we wouldn't yield to any menace of the things we were then united in holding dear. It's strange, isn't it, to see how subtly she has changed everything? It's as if our frosty, sparkling landscape, all wind and vigor and discipline, were suddenly transformed to this,—" Imogen looked about her at the limpid day,—"to soft yielding, soft color, soft perfume,—it's like mama, that fragrance of the wistaria,—to something smiling, languid, alluring. This is the sort of day on which one drifts. Our past day was a day of steering."
As much as for the meaning of her careful words, Jack felt rising in him an anger against the sense of a readiness prepared beforehand. "You describe it all very prettily, Imogen," he answered, mastering the anger. "But I don't agree with you."