Sir Basil, knowing that if he glided it was only because she took him with her, grasped it tightly, the warm, tangible comfort. "Well rather!" he said with school-boy emphasis.
Be she as wrong as she would, dear creature of light, of shade, of mystery, it was indeed "well rather." Never had he known how much till now.
Holding the hand, he wondered, gazing at her, how much such a friendship, new yet old, counted for. In revealing it so fully, she had set wide the door, she had set him free to claim his soul; yet so wonderfully did they glide that no gross thought of escape touched him for a moment, so beautifully did she smile that he seemed rather to be gaining something than to be giving something up.
XXIII
Imogen always looked back to her moonlight walk with Jack as one of the few occurrences in her life that, at the time, she had not understood. She understood well enough afterward, with retrospective vexation for her so ludicrous, yet, after all, so natural innocence. At the time she hadn't even seen that Jack had jockeyed her out of a communing with Sir Basil. She had actually thought that Jack might have some word of penitence or exculpation to say to her after his behavior that morning. As a matter of fact she could easily have forgiven him had his lack of sympathy been for her instruments only and not rather for her project. Really, except for the triumph it had seemed to give to her mother, the humiliation that it had seemed, vicariously, to inflict upon herself, she hadn't been able to defend herself from a queer sense of pleasure in witnessing the ejection of the Pottses. With the tension that had come into the scene they had been in the way; she, as keenly as Jack, had felt the sense of unfitness, though she had been willing to endure it, and as keenly as Jack she had felt Mr. Potts as insufferably presuming. She had been glad that his presumption should wreak punishment upon her mother, but glad, too, that when the weapon had served its purpose, it should be removed.
So her feelings toward Jack, as he led her down the woodland path, where, not so many days ago—but how far off they seemed—she had led Sir Basil, were not so bitter as they might have been. Bitterness was in abeyance. She waited to hear what he might have to say for himself and about her—about this new disaster that had befallen her, and with the thought of the retribution that she held, almost, within her grasp, came something of a softening to sadness and regret over Jack. In spite of that glorious moment of the pine woods, with its wide vistas into the future, some torn fiber of her heart would go on aching when she thought of Jack and his lost love; and when he led her away among the woods, thick with trembling lights and shadows, she really, for a little while, expected to hear him say that, sympathize as he might with her mother, reprobate as he might her own attitude toward her, there were needs in him deeper than sympathies or blame; she almost expected him to tell her that, above all, he loved her and couldn't get on without her. Else why had he asked her to come and see the moonlight in the woods?
A vagueness hovered for her over her own attitude in case of such an avowal, a vagueness connected with the veil that still hung between her unavowed lover and herself, and even as she walked away with Jack she felt a mingled pang of eagerness for what he might have to say to her and of anxiety for what, more than his petition on her behalf, Sir Basil might be drawn into saying to her mother on the veranda. She didn't crudely tell herself that she would not quite abandon Jack until the veil were drawn aside and triumph securely attained; she only saw herself, as far as she saw herself at all, as pausing between two choices, pausing to weigh which was the greater of the appealing needs and which the deeper of the proffered loves. She knew that the balance inclined to Sir Basil's side, but she saw herself, for this evening, sadly listening, but withholding, in its full definiteness, the sad rejection of Jack's tardy appeal.
With this background of interpretation it was, therefore, with a growing perplexity that she heard Jack, beside her, or a little before, so that he might hold back the dewy branches from her way, talk on persistently, fluently, cheerfully, in just the same manner, with the same alert voice and pleasant, though watchful, eye, that he had talked at dinner. Her mother might have been walking beside them for all the difference there was. Jack, the shy, the abrupt, the often awkward, seemed infected with her mother's social skill. The moonlit woods were as much a mere background for maneuvers as the candle-lit dinner-table had been. Not a word of the morning's disaster; not a word of sympathy or inquiry; not a word of self-defence or self-exposition; not even a word of expostulation or reproach.
As for entreaty, tenderness, the drawing near once more, the drop to loving need after the climax of alienation, she saw, by degrees, how illusory had been any such imagining; she saw at last, with a sharpness that queerly chilled her blood, that Jack was abdicating the lover's rôle more decisively than even before. Verbal definiteness left hazes of possibility compared to this dreadfully competent reticence. It was more than evasion, more than reticence, more than abdication that she felt in Jack; it was a deep hostility, it was the steady burning of that flame that she had seen in his eye that morning when she had told her mother that she was cruel and shallow and selfish. This was an enemy who walked beside her and, after perplexity, after the folly of soft imaginings, the folly of having allowed her heart to yearn over him a little, and, perhaps, over herself, indignation rushed upon her, and humiliation, and then the passionate longing for vengeance.
He thought himself very cool and competent, this skilful Jack, leading her down in the illumined, dewy woods, talking on and on, talking—the fool—for so, with a bitter smile, her inner commentary dubbed him—of Manet, of Monet, of Whistler, of the decomposition of light, the vibration of color.